l!inii'iii|ii';iiii'i|i'i;iill iiiiiii "iilllihiHil i iHli il l!!i!i' BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Henrg HI. Sage 1891 Z.S^.±oh.Z(^: /3//://_c,.... 6896- I Cornell University Library BR121 .W47 Modern thouaht and the crisis in belief, oiin 3 1924 029 237 315 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029237315 THE BALDWIN LECTURES, 1909 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA ■ SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY - CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE BALDWIN LECTURES, 1909 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF BY R. M. WENLEY D.Phil., Hon. LL.D. (Glas.), Sc.D., F.R.S. (Edin.), Hon. LiTT.D. (Hobart) Hefa gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909 All rights reserved Copyright, 1909, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1909. Norfajooti ^reas J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. "La pensee semble d'abord u'etre que I'esquisse afFaiblie des choses ; elle est mieux : elle en est I'iddalisation vivante, en voie de realisation." — Fouillh. " The liistoric personage Put by, leaves prominent the impulse of his age ; Truth sets aside speech, act, time, place, indeed, but brings Nakedly forward now the principle of things Highest and least." — Browning. "Und diess Geheimniss redete das Leben selber zu mir: ' Siehe,' sprach es, 'ich bin Das, was sich immer selber iiber- winden muss.'" — Nietzsche. ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDATION AND EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST Having regard to the peculiar conditions at the State Universities, where students of all denomina- tions stand on an equal footing, and where, there- fore, no theological faculties can be erected, the Right Reverend Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Michigan, in 1885, executed a Deed of Trust with certain influential laymen of his diocese. This was one of the first steps in what is known as the Guild Movement, now widespread and still growing. The Guilds are representative of the various denom- inations, and, as a rule, maintain their own halls, with libraries, reading rooms, gymnasia, etc., as headquarters for their students, and as centres of religious activity supplementary to their local churches. Lectureships often form a part of their plan. Thus, as a result of Bishop Harris's efforts, Harris Hall was built and endowed, to be the head- quarters for all members and adherents of the VIU ORIGIN OF THE TOUNDATION Protestant Episcopal Church who are teachers or students in the University of Michigan. The Hobart Guild was instituted to use and to govern the Hall. The Baldwin and Slocum Lectureships were founded, with adequate subventions, due also to Bishop Harris's enthusiasm. They are delivered in alternate years. The portion of the Deed aforesaid, relating to the Baldwin Lectures, runs as follows : — "Now, therefore, I, the said Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop as aforesaid, do hereby give, grant, and transfer to the said Henry P. Baldwin, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry A. Hayden, Sidney D. Miller, and Henry P. Baldwin, 2d, Trustees as aforesaid, the said sum of ten thousand dollars to be invested in good and safe interest-bearing securities, the net income thereof to be paid and applied from time to time as hereinafter provided, the said sum and the income thereof to be held in trust for the following uses : — "i. The said fund shall be known as the En- dowment Fund of the Baldwin Lectures. "2. There shall be chosen annually by the Hobart Guild of the University of Michigan, upon the nomination of the Bishop of Michigan, a learned clergyman or other communicant of the Protestant ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDATION ix Episcopal Church, to dehver at Ann Arbor and under the auspices of the said Hobart Guild, be- tween the Feast of St. INlichael and All Angels and the Feast of St. Thomas, in each year, not less than six nor more than eight lectures, for the EstabHsh- ment and Defence of Christian Truth; the said lec- tures to be published in book form by Easter of the following year, and to be entitled 'The Baldwin Lectures'; and there shall be paid to the said lec- turer the income of the said endowment fund, upon the delivery of fifty copies of said lectures to the said Trustees or their successors; the said printed vol- umes to contain, as an extract from this instrument, or in condensed form, a statement of the object and conditions of this trust." PREFACE Speaking in the House of Commons several years ago, that eminent and devoted churchman, Lord Hugh Cecil, expressed himself as follows: "On all sides there are signs of decay of the Faith. People do not go to church, or, if they go, it is for the sake of the music, or for some non-religious motive. The evidence is overwhelming that the doctrines of Christianity have passed into the region of doubt." Once more, the Bishop of Carlisle has affirmed: "There are, perhaps, few thin'gs, and certainly nothing of similar moment, about which men give themselves so little trouble, and take such little pains, as the ascertainment, by strict examination, of the foundations and the evidences of their reli- gion." Outspoken and weighty statements by re- sponsible persons seldom lack foundation in fact. Accordingly, in these Lectures, I have attempted a partial review of the situation, so far as my narrow limits permit. Thus, in Lecture I, I have drawn attention to the alterations that overtake reflective constructions of beUef. In Lectures II-IV, I have Xll PREFACE made an effort to summarize movements that justify Lord Hugh Cecil's declaration. But, as I have borne no part in the work of physical science and higher criticism, I am able only to indicate the pres- ent view from the conclusions of others. In Lec- tures V-VIII, I have essayed, in my own way, the examination suggested by the Bishop of Carlisle. I cannot pretend to expert famiharity with theology, so I have deemed it wiser to abandon this stand- point, represented most adequately by many others, and have confined myself to matters where I am more at home. It is obvious, to students at least, that we are passing through a stage of transition where hazards beset belief. Of course, I am well aware that a broad distinction survives between the "beliefs of the vulgar and of the learned," as they have been called. But, under the educational arrangements prevalent now, — and these Lectures are to hold them in special remembrance, — it tends to fade, with two results. On the one hand, some who deem themselves 'learned' hug the idea that religion has become a negligible quantity. Their learning has not matured enough to make manifest the deeps of our remanent ignorance. On the other hand, many are puzzled, often distressed beyond measure, by PREFACE XIU the metamorphic process coincident with enquiry. They resent the stress placed upon natural piety, and so they blink the issue, to sore harm of the re- hgious cause ; or, unappreciative of what knowledge has gleaned, they cling to belief of such a character that, under assault, it can scarce be distinguished from the despair of a last resort. These are sad hazards. It were useless, possibly dangerous, to keep the 'vulgar' in ignorance of the "wood, hay, stubble — man's work," and therefore subject to loss, especially as we still stand on the threshold of some scientific and historical studies, more particularly those destined to affect our views of the conditions and nature of self-consciousness, and of the precise environment whereout the New Testament and early Christianity sprang. It were cruel, possibly criminal, to keep the 'learned' in ignorance of "the things which cannot be shaken," for, in preoccupa- tion with comers of the garden, they are apt to miss a just estimate of their own general presuppositions. As a student, speaking in an academic community, I have tried to show why, and to indicate some reasons for doubting doubt that remains merely destruc- tive. At the same time, my readers must bear in mind that Lectures addressed to a general audience XIV PREFACE cannot be more than tentative. This ought to be realized especially in connexion with the purely illustrative uses to which I have put the ethical consciousness. Nobody knows so well as I the inadequacy of my equipment for this difficult task; and few can have had better reason to know how its prosecution calls down anathemas alike from defenders of "the faith once delivered to the saints" — for whom religion has achieved finality — and from rationalists who, in their horror of the sympathetic fallacy, cherish the notion that technical research can accomplish a per- fect work. These I cannot hope to conciliate, much less to convince. Time, that tries all, must be their teacher. But for such as believe that "the estab- lishment of Christian truth," rather than its apolo- getic defence or contemptuous dismissal, is an important part of the second Reformation imposed upon us by the contemporary course of science and scholarship, I trust I have touched some things worth further reflexion. In any event, I have no apology to offer for my view that religion is of primary importance to man- kind. Belief bears its recompenses, because our fragmental nature makes insistent demand for completion. PREFACE XV I extend cordial thanks to several eminent scholars who have taken the trouble to read portions of my manuscript, and to suggest improvements. They are not to be held responsible in any sense for my errors or my opinions. R. M. Wenley, CONTENTS LECTURE I PAGE Sheaves on the Threshing-floor . . . . i Introduction ........ i The New Attitude of Culture to Religion . 3 The Nature of Intellectual Constructions . 1 1 The Instability of Intellectual Constructions . 27 LECTURE II The Waters of IVIeribah 41 Supposition and Science 46 The Scientific Consciousness in its Methods and Conclusions ....... 54 LECTURE III Breaches of the House . . ... 81 The Historico-critical Movement .... 82 1. Ancient History 100 2. The Old Testament 114 LECTURE IV Humiliation in the Midst 140 The Historico-critical Movement (continued) . 140 3. The New Testament 141 4. Christian Syncretism 175 XVlll CONTENTS LECTURE V PAGE The Preestablished Discord 19° The Roots of Conflict in Experience . . -194 The Abstractions of Science and their Meaning; Consequent Discords .... ■ 200 The Discord as it appears within Historical Science 221 Man forced to seek Refuge in the Ethical Conscious- ness 230 LECTURE VI The Adjournment of Well-being .... 232 Religion and the Ethical Consciousness . . 233 Teleology and Discontinuity . ... 237 The Time-series and the Ethical Consciousness 245 Failure of the Ethical Consciousness to satisfy Man 251 The Passage to Religion ..... 256 LECTURE VII The Penumbra of Belief 278 Knowledge and Life ...... 278 The Mystic Element in Religion . . . 289 The Nature of Christian Conviction . . . 297 What think ye of Christ? 312 LECTURE VIII The Valley of Blessing 324 Religion under the Conditions of Experience . . 324 Christianity as a Missionary ReUgion . . 325 Christianity and Secular Polity . . . 332 Christianity as a Process : Absoluteness and Change 344 Conclusion 358 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF LECTURE I SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR The invitation of the Bishop and the Hobart Guild, calling a layman to deliver these Lectures for the first time, can hardly pass without comment. Inevitably, I must cut a sorry figure by comparison with my eminent clerical predecessors. Yet, para- doxically, the very fact that a layman lacks pro- fessional bias may serve as a makeweight. In all professions the initiate tends to fall under the sway of certain conventions. Indeed, were this not so, professions as such would cease to exist. Thus, in dealing with professional subjects, the accredited member of the craft inclines to accept a distinct standpoint whereto he has grown, almost uncon- sciously, through long years of training and asso- ciation. Nay, the more he has earned the right to appear as an adequate representative, the further, 2 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF as a rule, has this assimilation proceeded. I am unaware that the clergy are greater sinners in such respect than their brethren of the bar or the desk, the sword or the lancet, even if their public func- tion, in preaching, render them a readier prey to facile criticism. For every profession develops its 'system,' its 'form,' its 'ethics,' its what-not. In the circumstances inseparable from these Lec- tures, the tendency of the clerical 'system' might result, conceivably, in partial failure to distinguish between theology and religion, between creed and conduct, between the church and Christianity, or the like. So, once in a great while, it may prove refreshing, if perilous, to expose the lay mind, even with all its sins of feeble technique upon its head. Again, one passes no impertinent reflexion in say- ing that the clerical attitude towards religion is defensive, in large measure. Nay, we laity force this upon our ministers by our determination to hold them men of other flesh, of other mould, than ourselves. Accordingly, let us bear the blame, great or small, when we repeat the acute remark, "It is the mischief of the defensive method that the class of facts against which a man has made himself impregnable may be the very class of facts which it is his chief business to know." More than Hkely, SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 3 your layman may have been placed midmost these very facts in his daily work. If not, he may recall the trite doctrine, that a spectator sometimes under- stands more of the fight than those who are in the thick of it. In any event, he can add at least, especially as concerns religion, that he suffers the same frailty with all his fellows; for he is the same sinner, the same subject of ceaseless craving for — " The light that never was on sea or land," the same wistful supphant for — ■ " the wings of faith, to rise Within the veil, and . . . Possess the promised rest.'' It would be superfluous to adduce proofs of the statement that, in a single generation, the position of English-speaking folk towards ' Christian truth' has undergone large displacement. So much is quite sure. Moreover, one must remark, not merely that this change continues, but rather that its in- fluence affects wider and wider circles. It is no part of my aim meanwhile to deploy reasons for the modification. But one fact, slurred too often just now, merits comment. Obviously enough, man's estimate even of the deepest things of life 4 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF alters in face of new knowledge of nature, espe- cially of organisms, brute and human. Darwin was the — ■ " Calm priest of a tremendous oracle." Yet, after all, the world, with its objects, vital or non-vital, maintains a certain aloofness from those ethical, aesthetic, and religious insights that serve at once to differentiate man and to set his distinctive problems. No amount of sophistication suffices to obliterate the contrast between things, or stable bodies, in the objective realm, and processes, or inconstant successions, in the subjective sphere. Despite their manifold, indelible relations, they re- main two orders, amenable, perhaps, to similar methods of research, but always so amenable in different measure and with very contrasted degrees of success. We shall not be surprised to learn, then, that " transvaluation of values" in matters religious must stand to the account rather of historical than of biological or physical investigation. Language and literature, conduct and institutions, custom and myth, society and law, worship and dogma, — these, with their kind, together constitute man's peculiar expression of his own nature. Thus, fre^h results SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 5 in anthropology, ethics, comparative reHgion, criti- cism, jurisprudence, ethnic psychology, and the history of civilization affect our estimates of the significance, sweep, and implications of our common humanity as no hypotheses concerning bodies, or even the body, ever can. Being human, — "Some thought imprisons us; we set about To bring the worid within the woven spell." Now, Germany was the mother-land of these fateful 'human' sciences. There they had origin, grew, took definite shape, and found acceptance for nigh a century ere they penetrated the English world. Echoes were wafted overseas, indeed. But Coleridge and Carlyle, Emerson and Browning prophesied in the upper air to a stiff-necked generation. Their early audience would have little or none of them. "'Pauline,' a piece of pure bewilderment," said the London AthencBum, so late as 1833; and this was sixty-six years after Herder, "the gatekeeper of the nineteenth century," had published his epoch-mak- ing "Fragmente." Nay, a quarter century later, the greatest English scholar of the age, a man of monumental learning, seems to stay stranded out- side the main current of European thought. For Whewell,'in the third edition of his "History of the 6 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF Inductive Sciences" (1858), the enormous change wrought by Kant seventy-seven years before might as well not have taken place. Its real meaning is a mere vagrom rumour. Small wonder, then, that misrepresentation or, as oftener, sheer ignorance tangled the fundamental tendencies. Accordingly, Germany arrived at a gradual appreciation of the transitive principles peculiar to nineteenth-century thought by a slow, cumulative process, beginning with Winckelmann and Lessing about 1760; pass- ing through the several stages of Kant, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, and the Romantics; coming finally to clear consciousness in Hegel, and that historico-critical upheaval for which he, more than any other single force, must be given credit. On the contrary. Great Britain and the United States enjoyed no such period of formative transition. For, all things considered, the movement burst upon them in full panoply of power during the decade 1865-1875. Further, as if to accentuate the stress, it synchronized with the home-thrusting dispute over the Darwinian theory, and this at a moment when the essential identity of the two schemes, in ultimate attitude towards the universe, was not apparent. As always, controversy clouded the main issues at the outset. On the other hand, since about SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 7 1890 shouts of battle have diminished, party cries and nicknames have found their due level, a process of assimilation has wrought results in some measure. We shall realize this more in detail later. Mean- while, suffice it to say that we can now recognize the reason why our intellectual atmosphere has not been interpenetrated by these constructive ideas even yet. Astonishing darkness prevails in certain quarters, where illumination might be expected, while miscon- ceptions so strange that one is forced to conclude them undesigned to mislead, still provide pitiful commentary. Nevertheless, we are bound to re- member, in all charity, that when the waters of evolution rose and the floods of criticism descended at one fell swoop, dire shipwreck of their most holy things seemed imminent to many. But, in any case, perspective has altered. For example, it were im- possible to-day that the hue and cry after the "Ves- tiges of the Natural History of Creation" (1844) should recur over a similar book. As Lamarck said, browbeaten by his generation, "It is better that a truth once perceived should struggle a long time to obtain attention than that everything the ardent imagination of man produces should be easily accepted." ' ^ Philosophie Zoologique, p. 15. 8 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF At this point let us pause to remind ourselves sharply of some phrases used above. 'New know- ledge of nature,' 'fresh results in criticism,' 'hu- man sciences,' 'dispute over the Darwinian theory,' and so forth. What do they imply? Or, shifting the angle slightly, Does the average man possess much lore concerning these things? The answer is. They imply that religion involves an important intellectual element, and that the average man, just on account of his ignorance, may find himself at the mercy of this element, to his comfort, or, as so often, to his deep distress. By way of introduction, I pro- pose to consider the grave problems lurking here. An obvious course would be to set out from that copy-book platitude, the distinction between religion and theology. According to this view, the two are related as antecedent and consequent. The prius of theology is religion; for theology represents the reaction of reason upon inexpressible aspirations that flow from the 'heart.' Or, once more, theology broods among the shadows of abstraction, while religion wells up naturally in the free manifestation of faith. Now, admitting that such contrasts may serve a purpose sometimes, it nevertheless remains true that they are too naive. No one needs to emphasize the evident differences between theory SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 9 and practice, logic and life, the state and the citizen, pure and applied science; they float on the surface, naked and unashamed. Meaning attaches to them as aspects of a single whole, never as mutually ex- clusive facts. They appear as incidents of a dia- lectic movement, the one implies the other, and the problem roots in the nature of the connexion, never in the bare contrast. Whatever might be said of origins, we are unable to seek light in the darkness of the past; religion and theology so intertwine now that jejune and odious comparisons preclude any conclusion. To escape the consequent impasse another method must prevail. Our sole resource lies in an appeal to concrete experience. Religion cannot exist apart from some view of its necessary conditions, and these belong to human nature. "Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben Auf Erden hier; Wie schatten auf den Wogen schweben Und schwinden wir; Und messen uns're tragen Tritte Nach Raum und Zeit, Und sind, und wissen's nicht, in Mitte Der Ewigkeit ! " Taken at its best, knowledge about man leaves much unknown and, very likely, unsuspected. We cannot tell how we came by our perception of space, lO MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF with its wonderful localization of objects, surely a familiar affair. We know little about the brain, less about its intimate functioning as the organ of con- sciousness, nothing of the ultimate relation between the two; while our acquaintance with consciousness itself is lapped everywhere by the mighty ocean of ignorance. In the nature of the case, our inferences from the ascertained phenomena present themselves synoptically. That is to say, we must rest satisfied with results in gross, numerous factors being beyond reach meantime. Yet, even so, some points almost shout their presence. The reflective mind, at least, seizes them immediately. For example, beyond perad venture man's distinctive fate centres in his double life, — on the one hand, an animal moved to hunger and lust and cruelty, on the other, a sub- ject of aspirations whereby he serves himself a little lower than the angels. The eternal conflict between these two sets all his problems, originates all his fears and sufferings, but at the same time baptizes him into all opportunity. At his sweet pleasure he can "idealize himself into dirt" with — "a scrofulous French novel On grey paper with blunt type," or into devilry, — ■ "Squat like a toad, close to the ear of Eve;" SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR II anon, led by — "The Star of the unconquerable will," he may vault time and space, — "Pouring heaven into this shut house of life." Of a truth, then, we men grasp keys to most varied universes. These universes, in turn, together hold the secret of the problem now under examination. Accordingly, the question comes to be, (i) What import are we to attach to the term 'universe'; and (2) What 'universes' emerge if appeal be taken to experience? (i) In the present connexion, formidable although it may seem, the word 'universe' need invoke no serious terrors. On the contrary, indeed, it is a sim- ple commonplace. For instance, we declare, with perfect truth, that the American and the Englishman live in different ' universes.' Historical traditions, political organization, and social relationships dif- ferentiate their respective estimates of life. To the one a title imports less than nothing, to the other it carries a clear conventional value ; to the one owner- ship of land implies little, on the other it bestows a distinct social status; the one conceives that money can effect almost anything, the other is well aware that some things, attractive to him, cannot be 12 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF purchased. Again, take men in the same society. Contrast the successful merchant with the productive scholar. To the former the career of the latter spells failure — it does not pay; to the latter the career of the former misses full flavour — it does not pay in the right way, for it sacrifices the man to the bare pursuit. In a word, one of the most familiar facts of life finds illustration in the universal ten- dency to rate the same things differently, and by consequence to judge human affairs from divergent standpoints. The influences which, in sum, pro- duce and maintain such phenomena we call a 'uni- verse,' because it is the kind of totality forming the customary world wherein a man seeks his spiritual adventures. There he finds at once his aims and his motives. Anyone who cares to study, say, the proverbs of various peoples will grasp this immedi- ately; opposed types of 'universe' are embodied in the wise saws of the folk. Dropping these manifest comparisons, the real problem appears. If, on analysis, it result that mankind tends naturally, on the whole and without distinction of time or place, to reveal the occupancy of certain 'universes,' then our enquiry will have reached some conclusion. (2) Luckily, Nature lends such efficient aid here SHEAVES ON THE THEESHING-rLOOE I3 that no recondite process need ensue. For, whatever his limitations, every human being admits that his life presents two insistent aspects, neither of them to be escaped or palliated in serious measure. For better or worse, all occupy a physical and a psy- chical ' universe.' The contrast between things and thoughts forms the most evident, yet profoundest, occurrence in life. No one has the slightest diffi- culty in recognizing it, all assume it in the simplest functions and arrangements of the daily round. But the terms 'physical' and 'psychical' represent vast complexes which, to a certain extent, we not only can and do, but even must analyze. When I kick a stone or a man, I do not anticipate precisely identical reactions. We are prone to kick any stone, we have been known to select our man. Again, when I talk to a friend, or ponder some mighty achievement in history, I am perfectly aware of the great difference between the two events. Here, once more. Nature aids us by the very obviousness of her ways. Just as experience splits itself, with- out any effort on our part, into the 'physical' and the 'psychical,' so these subdivisions fissute in turn, and after equally spontaneous fashion. The 'phys- ical' presents two unmistakable aspects, — things and living things, especially our own bodies. In 14 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF like manner, the 'psychical' hives off into self and other selves, the former dwelling almost breathlessly upon its possible future here and hereafter, the latter entrancing by their multitudinous past and puzzling present. These four 'universes' envelop man at every moment. Negatively, he cannot flee from any one of them; positively, he may enter any one at will, and may mould his career in it more fully than in the rest. They are, then: (a) things, from the farthest star to the newest manufactured article; (&) living things, from the simplest unicellular organism to that organic community, amazing in its involution, known as the human body; (c) other selves, from naked savages, the prey of natural forces, to strangely intertwined contemporary socie- .ties who harness wind and steam and electricity and ether so that they obey them; from wretched barbarians, whose idols are placated by unspeak- able tortures, to Christian saints anxious to pour out their all if haply the reign of Jesus may advantage by never so httle; (d) self, from the vague time it could say ' I ' to those memorable moments when it thrills, or falters, or weeps over the — "obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things . . . SHEAVES ON THE THEESHING-ELOOR 15 Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a thing surprised." Our psychological organization is so contrived that it rives the universal into these fractions, and con- tinues thereafter under the main rule of one or another; consequently, the indivisible reality secludes itself afar. Here we meet the recurrent mystery of the One and the Many, an enigma since the oldest days of Hindustan and Greece. Yearning after the One, men are fated to work out their salvation in such a scramble of competitive aims that the task of unification seems hopeless or impracticable. "By the watercourses of Reuben There were great resolves of heart." Plainly enough, this entire analysis proceeds from an intellectual reaction upon ordinary experience. Principles of division are involved, and therefore the operation of more or less extensive knowledge, based on observation, attention, and reflexion. Even the fragmentary views of current small-talk presuppose no less. Now, as Darwin said, "no one can be a good observer, unless he is an active theo- rizer." ' In other words, facts and circumstances ' Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 126. 1 6 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF fail to reveal their true significance — or any sig- nificance, for that matter — till arrangement over- takes them. They demand a setting. A main vice of popular thought issues from the tendency to suppose that interpretations illuminating on one level of experience suffice equally for any. Nay, one may go so far as to declare that many difficulties vexatious to Christians now, whether pro or con some fundamental questions so called, originate in just this loose procedure. When subjected to criti- cism, they disappear or assume an altered aspect. Consequences of mental refraction, their relation to religion turns out more or less dubious. "We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best." At the risk of intruding dull or difficult matters, let me try to illustrate the situation. The plan may serve to clear our minds of cant. Although the universe as a whole forms a single unity, differentiation fills out our fleeting moments. Man, for example, can be viewed as a machine or as a 'hving soul,' or as any one of a dozen things inter- mediate between these extremes. But it is plain that the mechanical factor functions in a subordinate SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 17 fashion when we emphasize the 'living soul' aspect. While present necessarily, it does not determine exclusively the treatment of the problem. And this familiar subordination of some differences appears characteristically when the constructions of know- ledge come in question. The thinker or observer never sidles up to objects in a merely receptive frame of mind. The ideas he employs, even in abstract processes, contain principles of direction; the analysis, that is, proceeds with reference to an end, and struggle as he may, contributes to the end, moulds it accordingly. The method of ap- proach cannot but be normative. A pure external relation of subject to object is pure nonsense. Even in theory we caimot view the two as if they stood side by side like bits of china on a shelf, because they never so present themselves in fact. A transitive process operates invariably from the side of mind. The simplest way to realize this is to take examples. One instance from each of the four ' universes ' noted above may suffice. To avoid the easy objection, that I am preparing the ground, I have chosen quite at random, and have allowed others to speak pur- posely. (a) The 'universe' of things. "When a railway carriage is running on a straight piece of road, we c 1 8 MODEim THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF become unconscious of the motion unless we look at external bodies; but we detect at once any sudden change of speed. If the motion of the train be checked by a sudden appUcation of the brake, their inertia (which really maintains their motion) appears to urge the passengers forwards. A sudden starting of the train produces the opposite effect. While the steady motion continues, a con- jurer can keep a number of balls in the air just as easily as if the carriage were at rest. But these things need not surprise us. Our rooms are always like perfect railway carriages in respect of their absolutely smooth, but very rapid, motion round the earth's axis. The whole earth itself is flying in its orbit at the rate of a million and a half miles per day; yet we should have known nothing of this motion had our globe been perpetually clouded over like Jupiter. The whole solar system is travel- ling with great speed among the fixed stars, but we know of the fact only from the minutely accurate observations of astronomers, aided by all the re- sources of the Theory of Probabilities." ' Here we have what logicians call crucial instances. But, evidently, the crux, or sign-post, is dictated, as it were, by the uitellectual attitude of the observer. ' Properties of Matter, P. G. Tait, pp. 95-96 (2d ed.). SHEAVES ON THE THEESHING-FLOOR 19 Tait proceeded on the doctrine of inertia laid down in Newton's first Law of Motion. This, once more, lies embedded in Newton's third Definition of Force. "The vis inertia of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, so far as in it lies, perseveres in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line." Now, all these propositions are controlled by mental refraction. They represent abstractions from experience, possible only to a being endowed as man is. Within the sphere of things they apply perfectly, nay, can be made the basis of further interpretation. Professor Mach, for instance, would combine Newton's Definition and Law in a fresh and, as he conceives, more concrete statement. "Bodies set opposite each other induce in each other, under certain circumstances to be specified by experimental physics, contrary accelerations in the direction of their line of junction." ' Excellent, I suppose, in the realm of experimental physics, but what meaning has it when carried over into the fields of morals or religion ? The clew serves within the definite range of experience whence it came. In the psychological maze it leads nowhere. (&) The ^universe'' of living things. Here we may avail ourselves of a case stated by Mr. Alfred ' The Science of Mechanics, p. 243 (Eng. trans., 2d ed.). 20 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF Russel Wallace. It offers an admirable illustration of the inevitable tendency of theory to suggest reliable meaning, to hint the end in the means. "Among the numerous applications of the Dar- winian theory in the interpretation of the complex phenomena presented by the organic world, none have been more successful, or are more interesting, than those which deal with the colours of animals and plants. To the older school of naturalists colour was a trivial character, eminently unstable and untrustworthy in the determination of species; and it appears to have, in most cases, no use or meaning to the objects which displayed it. . . . But the researches of Mr. Darwin totally changed our point of view in this matter. He showed clearly that some of the colours of animals are useful, some hurtful to them. . . . That the colours and mark- ings of animals have been acquired under the funda- mental law of utility, is indicated by a general fact which has received very little attention. As a rule, colour and marking are constant in each species of wild animal, while, in almost every domesticated animal, there arises great variability. We see this in our horses and cattle, our dogs and cats, our pigeons and poultry. Now, the essential difference between the conditions of life of domesticated and SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 21 wild animals is, that the former are protected by man, while the latter have to protect themselves. The extreme variations in colour that immediately arise under domestication indicate a tendency to vary in this way, and the occasional occurrence of white or piebald, or other exceptionally coloured individuals of many species in a state of nature shows that this tendency exists there also; and, as these exceptionally coloured individuals rarely or never increase, there must be some constant power at work to keep it in check." ^ Just so. The active element here is the intel- lectual, for the simple reason that its predominance alone guarantees an explanatory synthesis. But the categories employed possess no more than analogical value in ethics, say, while in numerous aspects of experience they avail not at all. Suppose one were to employ them to explain the ecclesiastical colours proper to the seasons of the Christian year! (c) The 'universe' of other selves. A common custom, more honoured in the breach than in the observance, according to Hamlet, may serve our purpose here. "That one man should drink with another was regarded by our forefathers as a more sacred symbol '■Darwinism, pp. 187, 188-190 (London, 1889). 22 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF of brotherhood even than the sitting at meat to- gether. This behef was derived, in part, from the impression made by the stimulating effect of the wine, mead, etc., whose intoxicating properties have led to their choice by all peoples at all times for ceremonial purposes. In part, however, the idea of the inspiriting draught is associated with that of the blood, universally considered by primitive man to be the seat of the vital forces. He who drinks the blood of an enemy takes to himself the dead man's strength ; he who exchanges a drop of blood with a friend becomes thereby his blood-relation, as if a son of the same mother. ... But as the age grew milder, the symbolism of a draught from the same cup took the place of the original ceremony. . . . Soon the draught of brotherhood extended its range beyond the individual; it became an emblem of the union of host and invited guests, the cup travel- ling from hand to hand at the common meal. So the symbol reduces, first of all, to a simple sign of friendship, and finally comes to be a mere expression of social attention. When the cup ceased to pass from mouth to mouth, and the greater luxury of the time gave each guest his own drinking glass, the common draught from the same bowl was indicated by the touching of glasses, and the draught of SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 23 brotherhood between two comrades had degenerated into the modern toast." * But, plainly, apart from a point of view, sugges- tions of this sort would be impossible. In the time of Newton they never occurred to a thinker even of his genius, as his commonplaces on prophecy, that elicited Voltaire's sneer, serve to show.^ What point of view, then? Let Wundt reply himself. "Every phase of our modern life is permeated with usages that have survived from long-forgotten cults. . . . Among them, too, are many fossilized forms, the petrified remains of once living actions, which owe their preservation simply and solely to that vis inertia which is as characteristic of our ideas as it is of our material bodies. Now if we consider the bare results of these transformations, without reference to their historical past, we may easily be misled into looking for their explanation within the circle of our present experience, and sub- stituting the aims which they do or might subserve to-day for the true causes of their origination. But ' Ethics, W. Wundt, vol. i, pp. 143-144 (Eng. trans.). ^ See his Observations upon the Prophecies of Holy Writ, par- ticularly the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (in vol. V of Isaaci Newtoni Opera qucs exstant omnia (1779-1785); separately printed in 1733 and, with notes by P. Borthwick, in 1831. The edition of 1733 may be procured still). 24 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF in doing this we should be forgetting a law that is of the very highest importance in all mental, but especially in moral, development : the law that man- kind is prepared for the adoption of new ends of life by modes of conduct already existent, but pri- marily adapted to other ends. . . . The tendency of custom to live on in new forms after the decay of its original contents paves the way for the origina- tion of the most varied purposes. And if, in the last resort, it is a moral development that secures the greatest advantages from this law of persistence in the midst of change, credit is not therefore to be given to the law, but only to the forces of which that moral development is the expression." ' Here, once more, the theory lays down the lines of evaluation. And because it deals with the 'universe' of human psychology, its possible appli- cation in the sphere of religion becomes apparent on the face of it. (d) The 'universe' of self. No man ever left a starker self-revelation than Marcus Aurelius. Let us listen to one of his naked confidences, meant for his own eye alone. "You consist of three parts — body, breath, and mind. The first two are yours, to the extent of ' Ethics, W. Wundt, vol. i, pp. 139-140. SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 25 requiring your care : the third only is properly your own. Now if you separate from your true self — your understanding — all that others do or say, all that you have yourself done or said, all that perturbs you for the future, all that belongs to your material shell or \dtal breath and lies outside your own control, all finally that sweeps past you in the swirl of cir- cumstance, if thus exempting and clearing your mind-faculty from the play of destiny, you enable it to live free and unrestricted, doing what is just, willing what befalls, and saying what is true, — if, I say, you thus separate from your Inner Self the outer ties and attachments, the influences of time past and time to come, and so make yourself, in the language of Empedocles — " A rounded sphere, poised in rotating rest;" and train yourself to live in what alone is life — the present — then you will be able, for life's remainder and till death, to live on constant to the deity within, unperturbed, ingenuous, serene." ' A modem would not put it thus, because his out- look involves a widely contrasted mental attitude, based upon many new presuppositions. The em- peror's cross-examination of self was conducted in the light of later Stoic theory, and within the ethico- ' Book xii, 3 (the translation is Kendall's). 26 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF temperamental perspective peculiar to a Roman of the highest of&cial class in that age. The value and importance of the facts could not but be rated by reference to this transitive rational standpoint. The tenour of the passage transcribed renders it uimeces- sary to explain why, with Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism had ceased to be a philosophy and had transformed itself into something hardly distinguishable from religious aspiration. Again, the subtle and pervasive influence of man's inherited and acquired mental prepossessions con- tinues ascendant among the most fearless and capable contemporary thinkers. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority remain quite unaware of its enormous directive power, indeed, often deny it angrily, serves but to confirm its sway. Nobody would suspect Huxley, for instance, of treachery to science, rather his devotion displayed itself in a temper almost fierce. Nevertheless, did he not say of mathematics, — the servant of all experimental science as of many biological and sociological in- vestigations, — it "is that study that knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causation?" Perfectly true, no doubt; and yet, thanks to Huxley's very intel- lectual passion, how far his irony — SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 27 "fails from truth by every stale-meant word Half-wantonly meeting the times' demand." I should not have troubled you with these far- flung illustrations unless I had intended them to hint a definite inference. It is this. The intel- lectual factor in our experience even of the com- monest things exhibits instability. Nature — "speaks A various language'' as she passes from star-swirl to mountain-peak, from mite to man. "Black spirits and white, Red spirits and grey,'' is poetry or gibberish, as you please, never empirical fact. But so is — "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." Thus, when we want to be perfectly clear intellectu- ally, we discover at once that judgements luminous in some spheres produce darkness visible in others. Accordingly, we switch our mental currents, alter- nating from the useless or even baleful to the appo- site, as the context demands. Now, what is thus true of individual experience in its several contem- poraneous fields, holds also of genetic experience 28 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF when regarded in the Hght of its history. For us to-day, the legend of the nymph Echo, who pined away for love of Narcissus, till she faded to a mere voice, excites incredulity or, mayhap, arouses laugh- ter, — we feel inclined irresistibly to recall the famous smile of the Cheshire Cat ! Our woods are haunted no longer by Dryads and Hamadryads; to ask us to order our lives as if this delectable com- panionship still obtained, were absurd. Similarly, the psychological perspective necessary for St. Francis's preaching to the birds, or for Luther's ink-pot lunge at the devil, has disappeared. In a word, we regard such fables from another angle. So, just as we cannot put a price on tears, or tell the colour of love, we fail to explain blighted harvests by cold winds sent from the interior of Jotunheim by the Hrimthurses; meteorology has altered all this. In face of ethics, and sociology, and eco- nomics, we no longer seek counsels of perfection from the Norns. And yet, transformed completely as these intellectual outlooks are, our spiritual thrust remains very much as it always was. With his customary penetration, Jesus expressed this in that memorable answer to the Pharisees, when they advised him to flee from Herod. "And he said unto them. Go and say to that fox. Behold, I cast out SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 2g demons and perform cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I am perfected. Howbeit I must go on my way to-day and to-morrow and the day followmg: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." '■ Some experiences must needs be lived, knowledge cannot satisfy their passion. Others submit to logical constructions — causation, for instance. And the former, despite their elusive quality, seem to possess the power to bring us into contact with such changeless, stable states as our poor human nature prefigures. Intellectually, man has ever walked to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following; nevertheless, in the deepest things of his spirit, it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jeru- salem; if he perish there, men will appropriate his message preeminently. But paradox supervenes here. Suppose we grant (although it makes no vital difference to the argu- ment) that the insights of a Gotama or a Jesus are always embodied intellectually, by them as by their disciples. It would thus appear that the primary depends upon the secondary for its transmission or maintenance, and in relative degree becomes second- ary itself. I am unable to rest in this view. The paradox seems capable of resolution. For, the con- ' Luke xiii. 32-33. 30 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF ceptual presentation of this, as of everything else, cannot but be called symbolic. And the root of numerous difficulties, as of endless religious con- troversy, lies embedded in the constant tendency to deal with the token as if it were the thing betokened. The two patch up peace contmually on terms det- rimental to the one or the other; consequently, they have waged, and wage now, an unbroken, stem struggle. As the intellect presses forward to sit in judgement, life shakes itself free and demands justification. "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father." ^ In the profoundest sense, this hour never is, but always is to be. And why? Because religion involves elements that elude, not merely loiowledge, but even the set purpose of the men who, at any given moment, happen to have formulated it. Or, in philosophical language, its ultimate character is dialectical. To wit ; its constitu- tive process is of such texture that the mtellect cannot dictate its truth, or force it to abide in dependence on this or the other precise scheme. As the intellect passes the religious material through its medium, a transformation occurs which inevitably starts fur- ther transformations from time to time. The quod John iv. 21. SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 3 1 semper, quod ubique, et quod ah omnibus, so far as it can be expressed propositionally, possesses, in the very nature of the case, a local habitation and a name. For, the tension of the complete manhood, so typical of religion, cannot be reproduced by any species of intellectual alchemy. The explicitness of logic, say, necessarily removes one from the ' universe ' of religion to a region that may turn out of a far different sort. In brief, as knowledge clarifies the religious con- sciousness, it fails proportionately to exhaust it. So, doubt, or at any rate enquiry, finds due oppor- tunity. The slighted portions, as it were, reappear over and over again, with an imperative demand that intellect abate its toU. Moreover, this process consists in no appeal to sentiment, to feeling, or to some vague belief in vaguer eventualities, as many neurotic or credulous folk seem to suppose. Rather is it a reference to facts that admit of no trifling. The less must face a new triangulation of the greater, in order to correct its partial computations. For, clearly enough, the abstractions charmed by know- ledge from hfe fall short of the actual fact. Even the most general, and therefore the most true, 'law of nature' never apphed, as formulated, in every observed case. How much more, then, the poet hits the truth, when he writes, — 32 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF "I for an hour have grasp'd the great insight . . . A system, self-containment which is beauty, The beauty that my creed hath wholly missed." Thus, when we carry the question of 'universes,' with their evaluations and systematic prescriptions, into the traffic between knowledge and religion, we are boxuid to admit that the latter suppHes the pos- tulate. Of course, it is as impossible to separate rehgion from conscious research and reflexion re- garding its nature as to talk of a spiritual reality out of all relation to the chemico-physical world of our habitation. Notwithstanding, as matter of soberest fact, this blind, mechanical, uniform earth does contain the aspirations and plans of humane beings. For us, morals, and art, and religion are live things at least as potent as heat, and chemical affinity, and cellular change. No one enjoys a mo- nopoly of necessity more than any other. For, an isolated necessity, a necessity that fails to square with others incident to the same unity, were the purest moonshine. Accordingly, as intellectual judge- ments refract now this, now that aspect of our inconceivably complex life, readjustments become imperative, and such experiences as religion receive novel, often unexpected, interpretations, even although the fundamental ' stuff ' remain identical. Remem- SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 33 bering all this, I think we shall have laid hold upon a clew that may serve to solve the maze surrounding certain contemporary difficulties, even if, as we must recognize quite frankly, our human nature stands, as ever, — "well-nigh vocal with The insight of this tragedy of mute Omnipotence." Nor does the story cease here. As thinkers have shown often, men are mastered by an ineradicable tendency to express the ' spiritual ' and psychological in terms of the ' material ' and sensuous. In its elabo- ration upon hfe, knowledge at once syncopates and specifies by the use of images. The process serves to throw light upon our condition, because it exhibits, even when it neglects to emphasize, limitations bound up with our humanity. A cardinal example of this procedure happens to have occurred, and to have maintained itself more or less intact, midmost the very subject of these Lectures. The materialistic analogy from a geological specimen, or a river, or an animal species has been applied, and with amazing persistence, to ' Christian truth.' Search almost where you please (time and place appear to be in- different), and you will find the problem of religion conceived as if the task were to trace the derivation 34 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF of a fixed thing from a definite source. To attack the question thus, however, forecloses the result. The method only imports into the religious ' universe ' ideas that, primarily, possess no application there, and, secondarily, raises false, even irrational, problems by vicious analogy. The popularity of the attitude, like its constant recurrence, furnish startling com- mentary on the dangers superinduced by interferences of intellectual abstraction. But, for this very reason, it may be viewed as perfectly natural and explicable. Interferences similar, say, to those of a microscope, our conceptual constructs must be tested and cor- rected, even altered or removed, ere we reach a posi- tion to record the precise object before us. Aids to observation and reflexion they prove from time to time, without doubt; yet, plainly, they hold no patent rights hi truth. And the major difiiculty incident to investigation of religion centres precisely in man's habit of consecrating them as if they alone embodied ascertainable truth. But, just like 'laws of nature, ' recognized openly as abstractions from experience, these religious judgements are doomed to change, and susceptible to purgation from ex- traneous or temporal admixture. Negative instances transform them. For example, the discoveries of Copernicus, Lyell, and Darwui, on the one hand. SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 35 of Rawlinson, F. C. Baur, and Kuenen, on the other, have altered them profoundly in the course of a brief history; while they have been purified, with happy frequency, by those miracles of concrete human life called saints. On both sides, you see, hard and fast system must submit to constant readjustment. Thus, most conspicuously, God has justified his ways to man- kmd. You may conceive redemption in mechanical, or juridical, or domestic terms; all prove to have been no more than pictorial representations. The problem abides unlaid, still capable of further illumination by other less inadequate statements. So, if it be true, as many tell us, that the collapse of dogmatic Christianity forms the most significant among con- temporary movements, we need not lose our heads and give way to panic. Let us stress the adjective, remembering that, in the words of one of the most pious scholars of last century, "many a traditional idea which circulates amongst us seems credible only because we have never examhied it." ' Let us remind ourselves, too, that 'traditional ideas,' hke present opinions, are no more than essays to prefigure religious truth more completely. For the truth of religion cannot be brought in question any more than the truth of nature, no matter how much ' Still Hours, Richard Rothe, p. 68 (Eng. trans.). 36 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF or how often we may be led to revise our manner of formulating both to our meagre understandings. Finally, the considerations just adduced seem to force the conclusion that, whatever religion may be, it is not a set system of formulated doctrine, or even an aggregate of clarified behefs, especially be- liefs in the existence of imaginary, or in the authority and power of dead, personages. I have referred to ' the tension of the complete manhood.' ^ By this I mean to suggest that while, probably, a satisfac- tory definition of religion is beyond reach, every attempt at definition presupposes a certain psycho- logical state, — often termed 'spiritual,' — a state pe- culiar to human beings, so far as we can know. That is to say, we are confronted by a process in experience, offering the chief characteristics of other processes in self-consciousness. In all likelihood, examiaation would prove it excessively complex. Many coeffi- cients would enter into its constitution; above all, it would be directed by some ideal or apperceptive evaluation which, in its turn, would show up endless subtleties. It would imply "the control of our activity as thinking beings by conditions which are fixed for us and not by us." ^ And it might be very ' See above, p. 31. 2 Analytic Psychology, G. F. Stout, vol. ii, p. 239. SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 37 prone to involve the fallacy, universal among savages, common even among civilized folk, our neighbours, of mistaking subjective for objective necessity. Be all this as it may, the psychological situation in the process of experience, tense enough to rise to the levels of religion, certainly absorbs into itself those main factors of the inner life known generally as Intellect, Desire, and Will. Thus, as I have tried to indicate, the expression by intellect alone falls short of the jubilant reality, and unavoidably so. Reason seeks order, completion, unity. But the spirit-life swoops on, carrying intellect with it, and exacting original perspectives for original conclusions. Thus any effort after apotheosis of a single stage spells failure. Sufficient with incomparable sufficiency as the ' beautiful moment ' may be, its very perfection breeds defect, the instant its day of due reckoning passes. "... the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.'' The central and dominating fact in religion is its imperious call for a new way of life; and this seeks freedom as its indispensable condition. Yet, when man comes to think of such matters, the central and dominating fact is the imperious call for cut-and- dried system, for something 'to go by'; and this 38 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF seeks bondage as its indispensable condition. They have never been coordinate, never can be. On the other hand, let the intellect fall as short as it may or must, it is enlisted invariably, as if in veriest despite. The new creature cannot escape self-caricature. So, if the heretic of to-day miss beatification to-mor- row, the golden words that hush mankind might often fall upon silence. Every generation must bear the burden of this lesson after its fashion. The human soul chains itself at each successive sunset, and, with the glow of the next dawn, would fain strike off the shackles. But, enamoured of its evening artistry, doubts and tears, angry passions and ugly words beset it, as it rouses anon to the sense of an undone task, and fondles the forms it would fain break to be rid of impediments. Past satisfactions indeed rest satisfactions; notwithstand- ing, unprecedented sights so move, and prophetic promptings so pulsate that the throb of joy becomes the measure of unplumbed sadness. The ideal, as stated, as something to be maintained stoutly, baulks the ideal that beckons to distant and untried ends. Our tragedy — and our salvation — pivot on a religion that professes to come complete from a past dead and done with; yet this religion is, or con- tinues in vitality, only because quickened by the SHEAVES ON THE THRESHING-FLOOR 39 perennial inspiration of the blood-tinctured present. By a law of our innermost nature, then, we are con- demned to pass through the valley of negation ere we win any Pisgah-sight atop the mount of trans- figured and transfiguring faith. "For we are Ancients of the earth. And in the morning of the times. So sleeping, so aroused from sleep Thro' sunny decades new and strange, Or gay quinquenniads would we reap The flower and quintessence of change . . . The prelude to some brighter world." In the three subsequent Lectures I shall attempt to summarize the two intellectual achievements of the past century that are responsible for most of our present disquiet and unrest in religion; the hazards of belief congregate here for us. As I fol- low this difficult track, you must do me the favour to bear in mind certain things. First, I shall be compelled to deal with researches in which I have borne no part. They lie as open to you as to me, we are equally in the hands of their master-builders. In other words, I shall speak, not as an authority, but as any educated man might. Second, time- limits require that discussions of pros and cons dis- appear; these you can find in literature accessible to everybody. Third, I fear many fail to realize 40 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF just what is fast becoming commonplace among competent scholars; and so I am bound to arrange the material in such a way that its cumulative effect may strike straight home. This, indeed, will con- dition the problem to which I shall invite your attention in the four concluding Lectures. LECTURE II THE WATERS OF MERIBAH While, as we have seen, religion eludes definition, its character cannot be compassed in a series of words, a very general description may not transgress the bounds of prudence. Religion is a state in- duced in self -consciousness by man's sense of his own insignificance and imperfection, as contrasted with the high vocation revealed to him by his ardent, if froward, ideals. Incarnate only in human flesh, this psychological condition energizes two ways. On the one hand, it compels an accounting from the physical world, or seeks reply from Nature to all sorts of questions about which, fundamentally. Nature must remain utterly dumb. Sweep the mighty visibilities of the heavens with the telescope, the minute invisibilities of the earth with the micro- scope, intensify both range and power of observation as you will, you are thrust back, to say, 'Behold, it is not there!' The Sphinx is ever with us, for, on the Whence, the Why, the Whither, this frame of 41 42 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF things, as our immediate perceptions disclose it, has scarce a hint to offer. On the other hand, the religious consciousness composes an interpretation of 'spiritual' life, and would force the very gates of heaven to assuage its yearning. But, in proceeding thus, it quits the region of sober knowledge, and acquires what no pure scientia ever pretended to supply, — a constructive estimate of the relative values to be put upon events possible and probable nowhere outside the mystic regions of the soul. According as the tension of the religious process is, so will the satisfactions peculiar to this evaluation be. Here solutions abound in plenty; but they descend from their father, the heavenly vision, and betray everywhere unmistakable traces of their line- age, — an origin in ideal possibility, not in mundane attainment. "The night is come, and all the world is still. Men say it is a time for sleep and dreams; But now she throws no pall upon the space That spreads above me. . . Meseems This is the hour for man to bend the knee Of the full soul to the Divinity." Now, even if the ideal truth of religion be thus admitted, it were lamentable to forget that the THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 43 halting embodiment issues on earth. An intellect manifested in its own refracting forms and processes, emotions accompanied by the somatic states char- acteristic of an animal, albeit the most complex animal, and a will, foiled continually by circum- stances that are none of its creation, impose terms present in every statement. Thus, as these psycho- logical factors, in unison or conflict, happen to envisage experience at any given time, so the spe- cial activities of consciousness, typical of religion, express themselves. Accordingly, difficulties and doubts, changes and transformations occur, often cozening the human spirit, and yet bearing witness to its kaleidoscopic limits, as it struggles to liberate its dearest aspirations. These matters must now claim attention at some length. There never was a crisis when they de- manded more candour and plain speaking, or sin- cerer discussion of grave questions, especially before an audience composed, for the larger part, of those who, from day to day, are forced into contact with information, ascertained or in process of consolida- tion, that traverses some past presentations of ' Christian truth,' rich in sacred association to many, not least to myself. Nevertheless, nobody need fear facts; all ought to fear suppositions and ex 44 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF parte pleas, particularly with regard to subjects of the last importance for a sane view of the deep that calls unto deep in our common humanity. Afraid 'to face the music' of all that has become incor- porated in the treasure of knowledge, religion shrivels easily to superstition. It were surely most perilous that, confronted with man's profoundest needs, we should rest satisfied with unevidenced affirmations, or worse, with opinions erroneous obviously to every- one who is free to judge. At this good hour, re- ligion suffers violence far more through misbehef than through scepticism; nobody mocks Chris- tianity, thousands jest over the thaumaturgy where- with too many confuse it. Would, indeed, that we might pass the cup of these waters of bitterness ! But that is impossible — impossible even were the conclusion forced irrevocably to those hopeless terms; "philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept know thyself has become transformed into the ter- rific oracle to CEdipus — " ' Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art.' " ' The scene of proof — and of strife — lies athwart the strait way to the valley of blessing. Like Job, ' A Candid Examination of Theism, by 'Physicus' (G. J. Romanes), p. 114 (3d ed.). THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 45 we answer the Lord, and say, "Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak ; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me." ^ We tempt the Father of Lights, and in all reverence, because He has left us without other choice, contemporary knowledge being as truly a divine revelation as ancient faith. "And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the striving of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us or not?" ^ It will save misunderstanding, and serve to elimi- nate qualifications like 'perhaps,' 'but,' 'I think,' and so forth, if I state at the outset that my aim is to delineate the perspective, still unfamiliar to a con- siderable section of the lay public, resultant upon the entire trend of enquiry in the nineteenth century, and to envisage the attendant difficulties without any shirking. In other words, the main tendency of science and scholarship in our age, in its full rigour and vigour, rather than this or that restricted set of conclusions, will pass before us. This is no place to exhibit the apparatus in detail, and I must reserve particulars for another occasion. You will under- stand, therefore, that I am not necessarily in accord with every inference; I desire only to state the case ' Job xlii. 4. ^ Exodus xvii. 7. 46 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF in such terms that none can mistake its meaning. If we are caught in a veritable sea of troubles, we must know at least what dangers threaten. Unconscious of the strong synthetic and suggestive pressure exerted by the prevalent outlook of an epoch, we, even the students among us, tend to for- get that we gaze upon a recent universe, one con- cealed largely, if not completely, a brief century since. Cast the mind's eye back to the era of the Declara- tion of Independence, or of that mightier cataclysm, the French Revolution, and what close grip upon men, organisms, and things do we iind? Less than might be supposed. A mathematical conspectus of the mechanical relations subsisting between the molar masses of the solar system, extended by analogy to a few farther stars, formed the sum-total, to all intents and purposes. Of the physical state and chemical constitution of these units next to nothing had been ascertained intimately. Contrari- wise, misconceptions or random guesses abounded in the realms of chemistry, natural history, and physiology; astounding superstitions concerning humanity in its most typical achievements — reli- gion, art, morals, and society; nigh total ignorance about a possible coherent interpretation of history. Accordingly, we must recall that, since the dis- THE WATERS OP MEEIBAH 47 tinguished victim of the French Revolution, Lavoi- sier, dethroned phlogiston, the physical sciences — astronomy, physics, geology, and chemistry — have undergone extensive transformation. Since Bell noted the difference between the afferent and efferent nerves, the biological sciences have come to birth, and accurate conclusions from controlled observa- tion have replaced conjectures bred of mere sus- picion. Since Hegel enunciated the epoch-making principle, that human experience explains its own development, and that, otherwise, it is irrational, whole series of human sciences have been elaborated. Thus, no matter where we pry, we contemplate a universe unsuspected by our forefathers, and com- mand numerous principles hidden quite from them. Literally, a new heavens, a new earth, and a new 'all that therein is' salute us. Moreover, whether we be astronomers or physicists, chemists or physi- ologists, biologists or psychologists, historians or philologists, anthropologists or philosophers, we envisage our several topics from a standpoint identi- cal in essentials for everyone. Indeed, so far has this unitary movement proceeded that, for each, as concerns his special investigations, another view were well-nigh inconceivable. Yet, when Dalton was excogitating his atomic theory, just one hun- 48 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF dred years ago, this same view found no applica- tion outside 'celestial mechanics/ and, even there, room remained for contradictory possibilities, as was evidenced by Newton's naive idea, inherited by Paley's egregious philosophy, that a Being uncom- monly familiar with the laws of geometry had in- jected gravitation and inertia into the heavenly bodies. This compelling apposition, between the contemporary outlook and that regnant till about the middle of last century, may be brought to a sharp point in the statement that, for the former, the universe is one, for the latter it always was Iwo. To us, the universal processes energizing everywhere supply the primary well-springs of explanation; to our predecessors, an otiose reference to a somewhat, neither mind nor matter (or, as we would say, neither consciousness nor energy), to a somewhat, therefore, unknowable ex hypothesi, provided an extra-mun- dane mystery whereto nearer mysteries might be traced back. And the more subtle the problems on hand, the more intricate and elusive their factors, the more besetting the presence of this tenuous, pervasive makeshift. To illustrate: 'celestial me- chanics' almost excluded it, but in chemistry, biology, psychology, literature and language, morals and religion, in an expanding series, opportunity THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 49 oEfered for the vagaries of supranatural inter- ference. How potently this metaphrastic phantasy ruled may be seen vividly from a cursory acquaintance with the marvels supposed popularly to offer ade- quate guarantee of authority in morals, of the au- thenticity of the human mind, and of the truth of religion. Take the last, for example ; what a mourn- ful record appears ! The Ptolemaic astronomy, dis- torted by geocentric myopia, was made the corner- stone of Christianity. The divine inspiration of the Hebrew points was held essential to the preser- vation of orthodox faith. It was contended that, apart from literal foretelling by Old Testament prophecy, the New Testament could not be vindi- cated. It was asserted, by no less a person than Wesley, if memory serve me rightly, that the in- violability of the Christian faith is bound up with a belief in witchcraft. It was imagined commonly that man's hope of eternal salvation reposed on the historical accuracy of the creation myth in Genesis, and that the certainty of this expectation found strong credentials in the fable of Lot's wife and in the tale of Jonah's incarceration in the whale. It was actually alleged, with perfect sobriety, that the discovery that the world and man were created by 50 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF the Trinity on October 23d, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning, had essential bearing on the spiritual life. It was asked, cynically, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" Geology suffered judgement as "an awful invasion of the testimony of revelation." It was maintained, as an important scientific fact, that because "death entered the world by sin," there was no death on earth prior to Eve's fault. It was insisted that "of all instruments of God's vengeance the thunderbolt is the chief." Study of physics, as of medicine and chemistry, was interdicted by ecclesiastical order "on account of certain sus- picious novelties." The bones of a goat, suppositi- tiously those of St. Rosalia, were employed as fetiches to heal disease, on the obvious ground that "bodily infirmity frequently results from sin." Lunacy and hysteria were attributed to the machi- nations of Satan, and treated accordingly. It was stated gravely that the Almighty spoke Hebrew, and that every language originated from this one at Babel. Numbers taught that the Pentateuch was dictated to Moses by the Deity about 1520 B.C., and afhrmed that any other view must be stigmatized as "a mass of impieties, a bulwark of irreligion." The probable historical interpretation of the famous THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 51 Immanuel passage in "Isaiah" was dismissed as "horrible, false, perverse, and destructive." On the contrary, every scientific statement in the Bible was described as "infalhbly accurate; all its histories and narrations of every kind are without any inac- curacy, its words and phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy such as is possessed by no human composition." ' Baseless dogmas and childish errors of a similar kind might be adduced practically without limit ; and, strange to say, all alike — mon- strous, absurd, or merely silly — have been put for- ward as foundations or essential portions of ' Christian truth.' As a matter of fact, so far from having aught to do with ' Christian truth,' all issued from the precon- ceived view of the universe as two, the Irish-bull con- ception of ultimacy, now abandoned by investigators. According to current conceptions, the universe ebbs and flows in a single, vast order — of a second order, incommensurable with this, we know nothing. It presents itself as a 'closed whole,' explicable from within on its own terms, never as a broken system controlled from without by some bruited, but ab- sentee, designer. Such is the conclusion to which ' See, for very full details, A History of the Warfare between Science and Theology in Christendom, Andrew D. White. The weak point of the book is Dr. White's rather jejune notion of theology- 52 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF we have been, and are being, driven on all sides by serried testimony pouring in overwhelmingly from every scrutiny undertaken by special investigation. Obviously enough, it imports, not simply a change, but a complete revision of the ideas we can enter- tain about religion as, indeed, about anythmg. No doubt, a smooth agreement concerning the ways taken by the process has not eventuated, cannot eventuate, probably, for years to come. But con- sensus about the basal fact tends to become more and more unified. In other words, differ as we may and do over the means operative in the cosmos, less and less divergence exists about the attitude to be adopted towards the universal order. Whatever conclusions may emerge in a future we wot not of, certain it is that all who hold convictions respecting the immense importance of religion must face the altered situation — and the sooner the better. The churches, particularly if the laity will rouse and assert themselves, stand in the shadow of an unex- ampled problem, as of a unique opportunity. Signs of the times, so clear that he who runs may read, indicate a direct, strenuous demand upon them. It amounts to no less than this — that they bring Christianity down from the clouds of outworn sup- position to tabernacle in the common places of our THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 53 sore puzzled workaday life. The religion of unre- stricted, spontaneous access to God can hardly retain its propulsive leadership under the handicap of petrific formulae alien from the most earnest in- sight of the day, and permeated with imagery too often crass in its reminiscent paganism. "And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light. In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright." Beyond question, many cherish the conviction that scientific advance has bereft life of worth and hope. On the contrary, it is equally clear that num- bers raise a joyous peean to the victory of 'reason' over 'superstition.' In proceeding to attempt a delineation of the case, I shall not forget either ex- treme. But the root of bitterness will have pre- cedence. For the sake of convenience and brevity, it may be well to adopt the objective classification of modern knowledge. The 'universes' of 'things' and of 'liv- ing things' group themselves under the title ' science,' in the narrow sense accepted conventionally. So, too, the 'universes' of 'self and of 'other selves' fall together. But this unity exhibits two aspects. On the one side, it regards man as he has been and is; 54 MODEEN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF from another it contemplates him as he ought to hve, or as he might become. Thus the field of knowledge so distributes itself that we are bidden review the situation, 7£;-5i, as 'science' sees it; sec- ond, as it appears from the standpoint of historico- critical research; third, as it flashes forth in the ideal spheres of morals and religion. Yet, even accepting this tripartite division, we must recall that, in every instance, the unconquerable duality of human nature — as physical and self-conscious — produces disturbance and, by consequence, sets problems of the utmost intricacy, generates fertile misconceptions. I. The Scientific Consciousness It should' be noted at once that the tremulous essays of the early masters — Hipparchus, for ex- ample — and the refined experiments of a Ruther- ford and a Ramsay, of a McMurrich and a Morgan, exhibit no difference in spirit. The contrast hap- pens to be one of sweep — of the material wherein scientific method can work victoriously. So, at the outset, let us take stock of this common spirit. No recondite observation were necessary to prove that, in average affairs, the characters of our friends tend to differ. Putting the matter very synoptically, THE WATERS OF MEEIBAH 55 one may affirm that now this, now that, element in the psychological organization dominates an indi- vidual. We all know the person whom emotion or, as often, sentiment masters; similarly, some betray the primacy of intellect, others of will. Roughly, these contrasts of psychological expression correspond to divergent types of reaction upon the most ordinary events. Social institutions intimate as much. All members do not subserve the same offices, as an influential writer saw years ago. "And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then powers, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, divers kinds of tongues." ^ Plainly, the aesthetic or emotional, the utilitarian or practical, and the critical or reflective temperaments are ever with us, each ministering in virtue of its special gifts. The last has made the nineteenth century peculiarly its own, and, for three generations, has contrived to set its seal upon the prevalent trend of the age. As its self-set task would lead one to expect, its habitual spirit presents little, if any, mystery. Confronted with the tortuous operations of nature, the scientific consciousness scents order throughout, and strives to sublimate its consequent inferences into baldest simplicity. The ' I Corinthians xii. 28. 56 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF laws of motion, the kinetic theory of gases, the law of the tides, the theorems of the conservation of energy and of evolution are reductions of phenomenal flurry to very plain routine. Consequences of long, intimate, and most ascetic devotion, their history exhibits the attitude necessary to scientific achieve- ment. Thus certain qualities evince their unabashed presence invariably. To wit: in the first place, scrupulous care and unprecedented accuracy. Noth- ing is too unimportant to be overlooked; no trouble counts for hardship, so long as review and confirma- tion continue desiderata; above all, the uttermost loyalty to fact rules supreme. Secondly, on the basis of these qualities a certain confidence supervenes, and receives justification from the gradual rise of a solid masonry of knowledge. Small wonder! For, no matter what one's predilections or prejudices, no matter what one's hopes, or fears, or desires, con- clusions drive home with sublime disregard. In the scientific kingdom nought happens according to man's wish or will ; everything issues from a dry, intellectual recognition that thus, and thus alone, the unheed- ing phenomena take their changeless way. Third, as a natural sequel, the new coordinations coUide with otiose supposition and unexamined belief. The stimulus of conflict is generated, fresh material THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 57 forces itself within the scope of research, and the scientific mind presses on to wider inferences. But transformation involves destruction, and the very process vitalizes once more many affairs left for dead or foreclosed. This movement, fourthly, leads to formulations of hypotheses — everything cannot be settled in a moment; while hypotheses demand fresh observations, original experiments, and more circumspect reflexion. Accordingly, the scientific spirit displays its transitive qualities in two main directions. On the one side, by insistence upon the need for a definite knowledge purged of mystery and snap-shot opinion, it warns the human mind against impracticable adventures. On the other, by its total disregard of fetters forged by sup- position in the 'ages of faith,' it liberates mankind, and urges to the analysis of experience in its every cranny. Baseless authority thus goes by the board, and all restrictions, confining inquiry to ruts where 'peradventures' and prohibitions prevail, vanish away. Nothing is to be interdicted; nothing can be too unexpected or unpalatable, provided it pre- sent itself panoplied with evidence. In a free atmosphere a rigid methodism builds out its bridge, with elaborate precaution, over the chasm of the unknown. S8 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS EST BELIEi' Consequently, as the scientific spirit sees, its mission is never to conform the cosmos to a logical, much less to a theological, scheme, but to describe verifiable connexions, and to recount how these connexions are maintained as a matter of simple observation under conditions that preclude sub- jective disturbance. As Spencer said, in one of his earliest essays : — "Considered genealogically, the received theory respecting the creation of the Solar System is un- mistakably of low origin. You may clearly trace it back to primitive mythologies. Its remotest ancestor is the doctrine that the celestial bodies are personages who originally lived on the Earth — a doctrine still held by some of the negroes Living- stone visited. Science having divested the sun and planets of their divine personalities, this old idea was succeeded by the idea which even Kepler enter- tained, that the planets are guided in their courses by presiding spirits: no longer themselves gods, they are still severally kept in their orbits by gods. And when gravitation came to dispense with these celestial steersmen, there was begotten a belief, less gross than its parent, but partaking of the same essential nature, that the planets were originally launched into their orbits from the Creator's hand. THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 59 . . . While the genesis of the Solar System, and of countless other systems like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery continues as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved: it is simply removed further back. The Nebular Hypothesis throws no light on the origin of diffused matter; and diffused matter as much needs accounting for as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from mak- ing the Universe a less mystery than before, it makes it a greater mystery. Creation by manufacture is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together a machine; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. . . . That our har- monious universe once existed potentially as form- less diffused matter, and has slowly grown into its present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed." ' Free, with complete freedom, to inquire uito anything, man is as completely bound — bound to abide by discernible testimony. Of such is the spirit of science. ' "The Nebular Hypothesis," Westminster Review, July, 1858; see Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, pp. i, 55-56. (London, 1863.) 6o MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF What, now, of method? Like every method, that of science operates negatively no less than positively. Its exclusions signify not a little. Dar- win has presented this point with characteristic frankness. "By collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestica- tion and nature, some light might perhaps be thrown on the whole subject. My first note-book was opened in July, 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and, without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions. . . . When I see the list of books of all kinds which I read and abstracted, including whole series of Journals and Transactions, 1 am surprised at my own industry. I soon per- ceived that selection was the keystone of man's suc- cess in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could he applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me." ' The initial requirement of scientific method might be summed in the phrase, self-extrusion. To dis- cover what the object is, apart entirely from faintest hint about what it might be, or from what expecta- ' Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 83; the italics are mine. THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 6 1 tion might make it — this is a law of the Medes and Persians. "Nothing happens, it comes." So the questions, What comes ? How does it come ? How is it maintained in this way rather than that ? reach no unclouded solution unless the observer so con- trives as to eliminate admixture of self. The inde- pendence of the natural order forms a necessary postulate. Hence — and here lies the significance of the intimation — the scheme of things must be taken on its own recognizances. What you may think of it, apart from, or in addition to, its self- ordained march, counts not a whit. This becomes very obvious in the region of experiment. Little as the layman may appreciate the fact, the great diffi- culty of the experimenter is, not to plan experiments, but to bring them under such thorough control that he can dissolve them into their simplest concomitant elements. For, while experiment spells interference, primary analysis implies that the factors work thus and so without human interposition. Science, that is, enforces continual self-criticism as the prime requisite of a reliable method. Having insured this negative virtue, positive procedure is in order. Everybody knows that scientific research circles round observation. But observation means many things. For instance, it 62 MODERN THOUGHT AND THK CRISIS IN BELIEF reckons with first-hand knowledge only. / have seen such and such, I have noted this and the other, or, as a vivid colloquialism puts it, 'I have been there.' What artists call atmosphere must have been evaporated. In satisfactory observations the objects must stand out clear-cut and raw — precise, unmistakable results alone avail. No provision can be allowed for 'almosts' and 'possibles.' If doubtful matters emerge, and especially if they persist, the aid of colleagues must be invoked, so that personal equation may disappear. Here we light upon another characteristic. Certainty rests on the rock of caution. Professions of ignorance, recognition that, for the present, even bare facts stay sub judice, form constant accompaniments of eventual success. And this means, further, that the real investigator loves no phenomenon more than another. Before the tribunal of the ascertain- able all facts have permission to tell their own tale in their own way. Science discourages attempts to put a premium upon selection of evidence to bolster any conclusion, however desirable. It were almost superfluous to add that, when we pass from mere observation to that intensified species of observation known as experiment, the greater instability of the conditions calls for superlative exercise of the pre- THE WATERS OF MEEIBAH 63 cautions just enumerated. The laboratory has re- placed Nature to a large extent, but only because it offers a short-cut to Nature. It enables us to save time, we need not wait for the leisurely dame to act. It places us in position to repeat phenomena in- definitely, and it puts within reach very accurate estimates of cooperant circumstances. Again, ap- paratus does not exist for the purpose of construct- ing experiments, as the layman supposes often. On the contrary, it is nothing but a means for the ex- tension of our senses, as by the seismograph; for immense increase in their delicacy of discrimina- tion, as by the microscope; or it enables them to affect us in strange ways, as by the pseudoscope; or it insures an accuracy unobtainable otherwise, as by instruments for automatic registration. More- over, laboratory methods and equipment help us to isolate and examine special constituents of a process, to plot the factors of a phenomenon, as it were, and thus to obtain mastery, piecemeal, over its ramified detail. In total effect, then, experiment originates schemes for overcoming and combating human limitations, physical and psychological. But its veritable revelations are received under the same stringent tests that rule direct contact with Nature, nay, under conditions even more stringent, because amenable to the forethought of control. 64 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF The facts garnered under these safeguards, in- terpretation follows. Here we unveil another pro- cedure, one of analysis and classification principally. As before, the phenomena dictate. That is, the assembled data raise difficulties of identity, simi- larity, difference, and contrariety; and the crucial measures of combination into groups demand atten- tion. These hazardous excursions through the accumulated records serve often to disclose dis- crepancies, or even to evoke factors which had escaped previous notice. To scientific method even the slightest divergence acts as a danger-signal. The cry is, 'Back to the facts,' or the query is raised, 'What strange thing are they telling us now about themselves?' More than likely, the situation will call for a minute analysis. It may be necessary to proceed from the complex, supposed simple, to the simpler still, in order to find how disturbance origi- nates, what it betokens. This regress, like the difficulty of dissolving experiments, constitutes one of the most exacting practical problems that scien- tific method has to face. But, difficulty or no difficulty, the old fidelity to fact, the precision, the caution, are to be maintained only with sterner rigour. By consistent use of this method, the scientific THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 65 consciousness reaches definite results. The common phrase 'natural law' labels one kind of inference; the less familiar, and often misunderstood, term 'hypothesis' proclaims another. At present, scien- tific inquirers disagree about the nature of ' law,' more particularly with regard to objective neces- sity or validity, and I cannot enter upon the grounds of quarrel here. Suffice it to say, they involve a very intricate problem beyond the competence of science, and that two views, the 'materialistic' or 'realist,' and the ' agnostic,' receive support. The older con- tention appears plainly in the following statement : — "A Force is a Power which initiates or accelerates aggregative motion, while it resists or retards sepa- rative motion, in two or more particles of ponder- able matter (and possibly also of the ethereal medium) . "All particles possess the Power of attracting one another — in other words, of setting up mutually aggregative motion — unless prevented by some other Power of an opposite nature. Thus a body suspended freely in the air is attracted towards the earth by the Force (or aggregative Power) known as Gravitation. A piece of sugar, held close over a cup of tea, attracts into itself the water of the tea- cup, by the Force (or aggregative Power) known as Capillarity. A spoon left in tea grounds or a foot planted on the moist sand similarly attracts the 66 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF neighbouring drops. A piece of iron or coal ex- posed to free oxygen (each at a certain fixed tempera- ture) attracts the particles of oxygen by the Force known as Chemical Affinity. In every case there must be an absence of counteracting Energies (or separative Powers) sufficient to prevent the union of the particles: . . . every particle attracts every other particle in some one of various ways, unless prevented by other Powers." ^ Evidently, Allen laboured under the impression that 'law' existed in an external world, and there- fore that it could or did lead man into the precincts of essential reality. That is, natural law might be viewed as a 'thing' governing other 'things' and, by consequence, as offering a key to the constitution of being. On this interpretation, nature and mech- anism become convertible terms, for we know causes in substantial existence. On the contrary, many contemporary leaders affirm that a 'natural law' cannot count for more than a symbol. "A natural law, therefore, is not implied in the conformity of the behaviour of the energies, but this conformity is rather conditioned by the uniformity of our modes of conception and is also partly a matter of good fortune." ^ ' Force and Energy, a Theory of Dynamics, Grant Allen, pp. 5-6. ^ Popular Scientific Lectures, Ernst Mach, p. 175 (Eng. trans., Chicago, 1895). THE WATERS OT MERIBAH 67 " All principles single out, more or less arbitrarily, now this aspect, now that aspect, of the same facts, and contain an abstract summarized rule for the re- figurement of the facts in thought. . . . Cause and effect, therefore, are things of thought, having an economical office. .... In nature there is no law of refraction, only different cases of refraction. The law of refraction is a concise compendious rule, devised by us for the mental reconstruction of a fact, and only for its reconstruction in part, that is, on its geometrical side." ' Summarily put, these positions imply that we provide ' laws of nature ' by formulating uniformities of sense-perception. No 'law' is poised 'out there.' Our 'awareness' is solely of successions and co- existences of relations in a universal motion. If we agree, as we may easily, that science furnishes no ground-plan of the foundations of knowledge, but gifts simply a procedure for the dispersion of ig- norance, we shall have mediated between the two views to some extent. For, after all, a law, as un- derstood in both, amounts to a generalized statement of observed uniformities, nothing more. And, as the actual observations fall short of totahty, in the nature of the case the conclusion imposes probability ' The Science of Mechanics, Ernst Mach, pp. 83-84, 485-486 (Eng. trans., 2d ed.). 68 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF in various degrees. The instant we travel beyond this record, we quit the region of scientific stability. Again, hypotheses must be described as reflective extensions of ascertained fact." A hypothesis forms the antecedent of any judgement which hangs upon an 'if.' The consequent must needs be constructed from phenomena accessible to practical observa- tion. For instance, I find myself unable to account for certain phenomena in the dispersion of light. Then, on the basis of careful observation, I declare, ' If a molecule be a heavy mass, connected by mass- less springs with a massless shell, then these observed phenomena come within the bounds of the explicable.' But the relative credibility of the antecedent hy- pothesis depends upon its relation to the consequent, and this, once more, is built from the facts encoun- tered by me in the routine of observation. Evi- dently, then, the results of scientific method, whether laws or hypotheses, fall to be classed as interpreta- tions of his experiences by a being for whom they occur thus and not otherwise. In short, they belong to the intellectual realm, liberated as completely as may be from every reference to desire (emotion) and will (wish). ' Cf. Modern Electrical Theory, Norman Robert Campbell, especially p. 231. THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 69 Finally, what consequences emerge, as concerns the present subject? They present themselves in two guises — practical and theoretical. On the practical side, an impassable gulf separates the temper of science from the temperament of religion. By a steadfast instinct, the religious man refers in- variably to a 'cause,' or causes, capable of explain- ing much more than stands in scientific question as a usual rule. By acquired discipline the investigator of nature either rejoins, 'I cannot understand what you mean,' or answers, with decision, ' I find no trace of any such cause amid the phenomena I have ob- served.' In other words, for him the phenomena explain themselves from within, and, beyond this, no opinion can be passed upon them; he has been cured completely of — " that insomnia which is God." When Galileo's judges decided that — " The doctrine that the earth is neither the centre of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosoph- ically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith," ^ their evidence consisted of preconceived dogmas (proven untrue since), and of an appeal to faith, ' Congregation of azd June, 1633. 70 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF without pertinence in the ranges of physical re- search. Nothing could well seem further removed from their method than, for example, the astro- physical enquiries of the contemporary astronomer. And, if the practical test be applied, the result leaves no room for doubt. The propositions of the Prel- ates and Cardinals do not work; those, say, of the Director of Lick Observatory do. Nevertheless, religion and science remain integral to life equally; therefore a large discrepancy must lie secreted somewhere. When we uncover the theoretical consequences, the precise nature of the situation begins to loom up. The conjunct enquiries of the sciences converge on the decision that the universe is a single, if extraordi- narily ramified, system of energy. At all events, we gather this inference from observation and experi- ■ ment, no matter in what field. Not only so, we can and do deduce it from the most stable and authentic principle yet compassed by the human mind, — the dynamical generalization, outlined by Newton, and clinched since, in numerous unanticipated ways, by many others. Moreover, energy provides an ulti- mate to which everything else may be reduced. Starting, then, from this base-line (the most care- fully and accurately surveyed that we have, remem- THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 71 ber) , What follows ? Adapting an ancient affirma- tion, the final judgement formulates itself thus: the heavens declare the gloiy of Newton and Kirchhoff, the earth showeth the handiwork of Helmholtz and Darwin. One epitome of the cosmos goes glimmer- ing, another illuminates the firmament, full-orbed. At this late day it were superfluous to point out that these doctrines are not synonymous with ma- terialism, for materialism has been relegated to the bottomless limbo of epistemological discards. Nev- ertheless, they intimate, with no uncertain sound, that nature presents itself as a self-explanatory totality. Even in the tenuous region of mind, natural causes are found to suffice for natural effects. As Huxley said, science means " the gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." ' When European culture had accustomed itself to the Copernican astronomy, no one objected to the sub- stitution of mechanical law for supernatural design, so far as the stars in their courses were concerned. And the same story, substantially, can be related about the direful discoveries of geology and biology in the course of last century. The folk who assev- 1 On the Physical Basis of Life, Collected Works, vol. i, p. 159 (London, 1893). 72 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF erated that "the principle of natural selection con- tradicted the revealed relation of creation to its Creator," laid Darwin at Lyell's side in the hallowed fane twenty-two years later. And, in our own persons, a similar movement has operated to vaster issues after another lapse of a quarter century. Educated men, at least, agree to accept natural explanations, not only for foreign objects in the stellar offing, but, through the offices of chemistry, physiology, and biology, for the nearest intimacies of their own flesh. Nay, not content with these triumphs, science has essayed a bolder step. The evolution hypothesis has laid hold upon the dis- tinctively spiritual organization. Psychology, for instance, and anthropology in its festooned rami- fications, proceed upon a naturalistic basis no less confidently than the sciences of 'external' nature. Huxley's affirmation, if a statement of fact in his day, bears the semblance of a prophecy to us. For, materialism, thrust from the front door of the scientific edifice with mighty clangour, has been succeeded by a new tenant, smuggled in quietly at a side entrance — one like-minded, if less disagree- able. Naturalism is in occupancy. Now Naturalism pivots fundamentally upon the doctrine of evolution, nay, upon the doctrine of THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 73 evolution interpreted in one way, and therefore committed to the exclusion of certain competitive views. Drawn synoptically, the position may be outlined thus: the most complex phenomena of nature are reducible to simpler, these to still simpler, until, at length, one arrives at bed-rock in determina- tions of motion, capable of synthesis and retention in mathematical formulse. For psychology, — "The soul and its faculties, the great entity and the small entities, disappear, and we have to do only with internal events, which as sensations and mental images translate physical events, or which, as ideas, movements, volition and desire, are trans- lated into the physical events. . . . Psychology is connected again with the laws of life and with its mechanism." ^ For the sciences to which physiology is basal, the most careful investigators — "see no grounds for accepting a vitalistic principle that is not a physico-causal one." ^ Thus, — "when we attempt to think out what the organiza- tion is, we almost unavoidably think of it as a struc- ture having the properties of a machine, and working ^ German Psychology of To-Day, Th. Ribot, p. 8. ' Regeneration, Thomas Hunt Morgan, p. 287. 74 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF in the way in which we are accustomed to think of machines as working." ' Again, — "During the last twenty years the relation between the transformation of matter and energy has played a prominent part in physiological research. . . . Robert Mayer and Helmholtz announced the prin- ciple of the conservation of energy and regarded its applicability to the human organism as an axiom. Recent investigation has done notable service in proving this axiom with certainty. It was demon- strated, in the case of animals at rest, that the heat given out was exactly equal to that of the combus- tion of the substances assimilated in the body (Rubner). . . . After having resolved the simpler problem of determining the transformation of energy in the resting body, the more difficult task of measuring this transformation during work was undertaken. By modification of the above-indicated methods one is now able to find out precisely how much nourishment the animal organism must use if it is to perform a definite amount of mechanical labour. " American investigators, Atwater, Benedict, and their fellow-workers, have recently, in a very complete way, followed the transformation of matter and energy in man, under various conditions of nourish- ment, and occupation. The respiratory calorimeter ' Regeneration, Thomas Hunt Morgan, p. 281. THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 75 which they constructed is the most perfect machiae that has hitherto been devised for the study of the transformation of matter and energy in Kving animals. With these investigations concerning the amount of matter and force needed by man and beast in various work, together with the study of the most efficient foods, the physiology of nutrition enters into hygienic and sociological questions of the great- est significance." * Or, as our foremost American authority. Professor Jacques Loeb, holds, instincts have developed out of reflexes, thinking out of instincts; thus, as bio- chemical research seems to prophesy, the whole problem ,of human thought will be explained finally in terms of physical chemistry. And so the incomplexity — by comparison — of chemistry and physics is reached, and we find our- selves dominated thoroughly by the mechanical the- ory, the most abstract, and therefore the most work- able and accurate, of all human generalizations. Consequently, in the last analysis, every research yields to a resolution "als Mechanik der Atome."^ Throughout the entire welter of phenomena, this ' The International Quarterly, vol. xii, No. 2, pp. 327-328, Nathan Zunz {The Progress of Physiology). ^ Cf. Die Willenshandlung, Hugo Miinsterberg, p. 9, and passim. 76 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF account suffices, whatever our religious views; and we abide by it implicitly in practical afifairs, — in en- gineering, in dietetics, in the regulation of pubHc health, in domestic plumbing, and so on. The me- chanical theory is over all our works. The uniformity of nature, widenmg ever as research blazes its labori- ous trail, seizes fresh phenomena and affords such explanation as is attainable under the inexorable circumstances. For our present subject, the gravity of the conclusion can scarcely be exaggerated, be- cause, if it hold, ' Christian truth,' in any con- ventional codification of it, has fallen upon irremediable bankruptcy. Nakedly set forth, the theory comes to this. Ob- servation and experiment, as conducted under rigid conditions in the natural sciences, combine to show that the universe is to be adjudged unalterably a mech- anism. The human body, on the current reading of evolution, cannot be regarded as other than a bit of this mechanism, while consciousness sinks to the level of an ' epiphenomenon,' a side issue, of the nervous system. So all the activities, segregated from the purely physical world traditionally, under the term 'self-consciousness,' take their places among the other facts of nature. No break asserts its presence. This granted, every vestige of ' Christian THE WATERS OF MERIBAH 77 truth ' disappears, a more completely baseless fabric of a dream never sprang from fond, unchastened imagination. Even if aspiration be allowed some free play, as a kind of charity, the utmost comfort available to ease the sombre burden of life simmers down to that neo-Stoicism taught openly now in several quarters. "Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, om- nipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undis- mayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his con- demnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power." ' At the moment, it is none of my affair to attempt adjudication upon the adequacy, much less the truth, ' Ideals of Science and Faith, p. 169, Hon. Bertrand Russell (An Ethical Approach); edited by the Rev. J. E. Hand. 78 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF of these systematic inferences. Rather, my point is taken thus: they proclaim a crisis that admits of no half-measures, of no paltering in any shape. Confronted thus, as we are, it were worse than useless to rehearse hoary propositions formulated at a time when other possibihties engaged mankind; it were mere folly to fold one's hands, so to speak, and indulge a soporific hope that, somehow, all may end well. These things do not lie on the lap of the gods, they happen to be human issues, amenable to human influences, and to none other. As a matter of plain fact (forgive me for reminding you once more), western civilization accepts the concatenation of phenomena, whence such views have precipitated, at every turn in practical life. Your railroads and trolley cars, your telegraphs and telephones, your hospitals and laboratories, in brief, the thousand things that constitute the very possibility of all that you term civilization, were created by the devotion of many who, in loyalty to their own insight, feel con- strained to these positions. Moreover, as concerns knowledge itself, on the theoretical side, the average man agrees to-day that the astronomer and physicist, the chemist and physiologist, the biologist and physi- cian, the psychologist and philologist, have earned the right to speak with authority. The old-time THE WATERS 03? MERIBAH 79 scribes have met their Waterloo, as many recognize, if in dazed fashion. Or, to put the case otherwise, science has become such an enormous power in the most ordinary affairs of existence, and no less in the circumambient perspective whereui we set the import of our lives, that it were fatuity to suppose ourselves able to disregard even its extremest pronouncements. To adopt its advice when useful or pleasant, to pass it by on the other side when it constrains or seems distasteful, is a course closed to the reflective mind. That numbers have availed themselves of this sub- terfuge during the past generation throws no lustre on human perspicacity. That an evasion so obvious can continue, the trend of the intellectual events from day to day shows, decisively, to be out of the reckoning. To use a homely phrase, 'you can't eat your cake and have it.' Either you must capitulate at discretion eventually, or you must be prepared to reconsider, de novo, the place of religion in ex- perience. The naive simplicity of orthodox belief, so called, has gone beyond recovery. Disaster or not, mental innocence has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at the hands of science. This, at a minimum, stands beyond question. Whether, on the other side, naive heterodoxy has proven itself a defensible consummation is an entirely 8o MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF different affair. In any event, it serves itself now as a philosophy of the universe; despite its multi- plied placards, erected in warning against 'metaphys- ical quagmires,' it parades, not merely as a meta- physic, but as a metaphysic of a highly dogmatic type. We may say, therefore, "Thou hast appealed unto Caesar; unto Caesar shalt thou go." ' But, mean- time, this appeal releases nobody from the obligation to recognize the immense change frankly, to become familiar with its basis, factors, and logic. ' Acts XXV. 12. LECTURE III BREACHES OF THE HOUSE Even if he admit the validity of scientific method, and appreciate the sweep of the scientific view of the universe, the dogmatic Christian may yet exclaim, "Our withers are unwrung!" Un- doubtedly, he may allege that the natural sciences, while paramount in affairs pertaining to the physical world in its widest scope, cannot deal with spiritual life. He may remind himself that affection, and devotion, and worship elude mathematical formulae, are intractable to causal relationship, and, more than likely, evade the grasp of mechanical, chemical, or physiological characterizations. Nay, as matter of record, religion has continued to maintain itself inviolable against the assaults, say, of materialism in the mid-nineteenth century, by a more or less conscious affirmation of this very argument. The average man cannot be expected to realize that the weapon cuts both ways, that it is as dangerous to the user, religion, as to the intellectual constructions attacked. Therefore we may admit the plea for the 82 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF moment. But, when one comes to historico-critical research and its conclusions, no such extenuations avail. History and criticism stand on the same plane with religion. They deal with self-conscious- ness, proceed from it. In short, the breaches they effect are "breaches of the house," not merely devas- tations, perilous, maybe, but perilous afar. Here, then, we must anticipate an internal assault, one from which no easy way of escape offers. If science threaten, history and criticism seem in a position to command. II. The Historico-Critical Movement As its title impKes, the historico-critical movement belongs to that most modem group of investigations known generally by the name ' human ' sciences. From the earliest times till within recent years, the activities typical of mankind were sequestered from exact enquiry. " Order, Heaven's first law," appeared to be set at defiance by the multifarious chances of society, morals, art, and religion. Myth, legend, and marvel found congenial environment here, be- cause they alone sufficed to bridge yawning gaps; while supposition, no matter how far-fetched, did duty for objective fact as concerned phenomena so rooted hi the recesses of psychological peculiarity BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 83 that the resources of intelligence were foiled. Thus mystery cloaked human doings on all sides, and even the most penetrating scientific minds were nowise loath to admit that the imiverse was dual — a natural order expressing itself without variableness or shadow of turning, and an inward spirit, flashing forth with caprices so strange that suprahuman intervention became a regnant postulate/ But, in the wane of the eighteenth century, several thinkers, especially in Germany, began to suspect that diligent study of the past might "lead into the council chamber of fate," to use the words of Herder, in whose seminal works, "Folk Songs," "Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind," and "God, Friendly Con- versations," this suspicion crystallized into something like system. Hegel, the only philosopher whom modem Europe can place beside the masters of those who know, — Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, — articulated Herder's suggestions, and, since his death, in 1 83 1, thanks mainly to his epoch-making fer- mentum cognitionis, supplemented by that of Comte in France, an extensive group of expert investigations has concentrated upon the elusive theme. Anthro- pology, archaeology, philology, in their numerous ramifications, the historical disciplines, and allied ' One of my own teachers, the late Lord Kelvin, countenanced this position. 84 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF studies have torn the veil of mythology from man's past, and taught us to regard his present as part of a vast self-developing order. We have learned that all articulated knowledge is science, that operative principles can be discovered, not merely in the physi- cal universe, but even in the most unlikely corners of the psychological realm. In a word, the trans- formation of possible views concerning humanity is almost more profound than the parallel reversal in the natural sciences. The barest description of a field so immense is quite beyond my competence. It may help, however, if I attempt to illustrate the general process by refer- ence to a single case with which, in all likelihood, you possess some acquaintance — I mean the civili- zation of ancient Greece. When the foremost classical scholars of the day were schoolboys, Greece enjoyed a comparatively brief history, as history counts now. Moreover, she seemed isolated in exceptional fashion, and her sudden cultural efflorescence was a perennial wonder. The Homeric poems were conceived, and rightly, as legends in romantic form, dating back probably between the eleventh and eighth centuries B.C. Full of picturesque traditions and enthralling story, even their most vivid descriptions could not be verified BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 85 historically. As products of poetic imagination they were magnificent, unparalleled; as reminiscences of an actual civilization they implied httle, and served only to engender speculations impossible to check. Indeed these speculations flourished luxuriantly. But, after 1870, Greece gained even more reality than she had possessed hitherto. The discoveries of the temple and halls of Olympia, by Curtius and his colleagues, injected fresh life into the glorious fifth century. At Pergamon Conze uncovered the colossal work, such as the wonderful altar, characteristic of Hellenic genius after Alexander the Great. Mean- while, almost in the twinkling of an eye, the mythical Greece of Homeric legend was set before an astonished world. From 1870 to 1885 the remarkable and mani- fold discoveries of Schliemann, at Hissarlik, Mycenae, Orchomenos, and Tiryns successively, revealed the existence of a complex prehistoric culture, ante- dating the Homeric poems by four centuries or more. While it may be doubted whether Schliemann re- covered the grave of Agamenmon and the treasure of Priam, or explored the house of Atreus, it is true that he bared the palaces of Homeric rulers, and that he compelled the reconsideration of the course of civilization in what was to become ' Greece.' In any event, the end was not yet. The French ex- 86 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF cavations at Delphi, the Jerusalem of Greece, those of the Americans at the Argive Heraeum, the met- ropolitan shrine of pre-Homeric times, served to whet expectation, to dissipate some difficulties, and to create others. Nor is this all. Writing about twenty-five years ago, in full ac- quaintance with Schliemann's larger results, one of the most judicious historians of Greece said : — "Another example of the influence of imagination on the form assumed by early history is furnished by the personality of Minos. In Homer he is a son of Zeus. . . . Hesiod makes him rule with the sceptre of Zeus over many men dwelling around him. . . . Herodotus makes Minos rule over the islanders. . . . According to Thucydides, Minos was the first king who possessed a fleet of war. . . . We hold, on the contrary, that Minos is a mythical personage, like Perseus and Heracles, and that the actions which are ascribed to him as history are nothing but a gradual accretion of legendary embellishments. We might just as well look upon his colleague Macus as a historical personage, and commend his mild rule over his people." ^ Yet, as the first months of the twentieth century dawned, an English investigator^ found, ' History of Greece, Adolph Holm, vol. i, pp. 49-50 (Eng. trans.). ^ Dr. Arthur J. Evans, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 87 in Crete, marvellous evidences of a great empire, based on sea power, over which this same Minos ruled.' The Homeric tradition, that Minos lived before Agamemnon, like some of the other traditions mentioned by Holm, received unforeseen confirmation. The palace at Knossos, let alone numerous other discoveries, at Zakro, Palaikastos, Praeses, Mount Ida, Mount Dicta, and Vapheio near Sparta, raise problems of the most acute interest, bring much prehistoric mystery to the light of open day, and make it possible to initiate enquiry into what may come to be termed '^gean' civilization. As with Schliemann, so here, it may not be true that Dr. Evans has found the storied Labyrinth and tracked the awful Minotaur to his familiar haunts, or wandered in the palace of Alcinous. But he may have set back a civilization to which "we are justified in applying the name Greek" ^ to a period 3800 B.C., that is, relatively as early as our knowledge of Egypt; nay, he may have furnished warrant for the inference that primitive man made his home here at a time when the Sumerians were ' I do not imply that a Minos was historical, of course; the name is possibly a title, like Caesar, or, like Creon, may mean simply a ruler. On Crete as a 'world-power,' see Les Pheniciens et I'Odys- see, Victor Berard, vol. i, pp. 225 f. ^ A. Furtwangler in the International Quarterly, vol. xii, p. 109. 88 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF founding their city on the Persian Gulf. However this may turn out ultimately, the ascertained facts afford plenteous surprises. A modem lavatory and drainage system, examples of the goldsmith's art unrivalled except by the Italian craftsmen of the Renascence, plaster work fit to stand comparison with the sculpture of the classical age, achievements in porcelain so excellent as to suggest connexion with the idealized plaques of the shield of Achilles,' numerous intaglios graven finely with various mon- sters, a system of weights and money, clever miniatures on crystal, mural paintings of tribute bearers, — all point to a forceful empire, pulsating with intense life, far away in the mists of a dim antiquity. The palace of its monarchs, as now excavated, taken with the accessories found there, may well render the famous passage in the "Odyssey"^ no romantic legend, but rather a memory of an impressive fact; while the paved Theatral Area cannot but recall the dancing ground "such as once in spacious Knossos Daedalus fashioned for Ariadne of the braided hair." ' ' Iliad, xviii, 478 f. ^ viii, 83 f. ^ Iliad, xviii, 590 f. The first building at Knossos is striking in its non-Hellenic character; the Cretan palace is a labyrinth of rooms, the Northern (or Hellenic) Megaron is one- roomed; at Mycena; and Tiryns, for example, the two styles are found in combination. BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 89 Who these Mino'ans, master-builders and rare artists, may have been, scholars are not yet clear. Their work intimates at least that Periclean art was no fatherless sport in the ^gean environment. Moreover, their religion offers pregnant hints, full of intricate problems. It centred round the cult of a female divinity, evidently a nature-goddess, and therefore associated with fertility.' With her an obscurer being, a god, was worshipped, and held in regard sometimes as her son, sometimes as her hus- band. This collocation, so strange to us, at once suggests the parallel of Ishtar and Tammuz, with its very remote goddess-mother and long retinue of per- sistent myths. Traces of fetich worship, kindred with the Semitic, exist also. The trilith, or sacred portal, at Goulas, the asherahs and massebas, the sacred doves and dovecote, the tree cult, must compel further enquiry and, at length, serve to extri- cate some questions intractable now. And so the problem of the relation between Minoan and Semitic culture becomes urgent, especially if, as some were formerly wont to think, Sargon of Agadfe never saw the "Upper Sea." Can the one enable us to under- stand the other better ? Did they come into contact ? if so, how and when, and how intimately? If not, ' She was also the queen of wild beasts. go MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF what comparative results can we extract from analysis of the respective cults ? Again, can it be maintained that Phoenician art was no more than Minoan in a decadent stage? In view of Dr. Evans's 'library' from the palace, containing about one thousand tablets, written in a clear script, which antedates Phoenician writing by five centuries, what are we to say next of the settled opinion that assigns the Greek alphabet to Phoenician sources? Was an Indo- European language the medium of communication in the ^gean basin during the Minoan supremacy? ' When scholars acquire the key to the Knossos tablets, shall we be able to close the gap between Eastern and Western civilization so called ? What is the relation of the Minotaur to the Hittite god (Sutekh ?) standing on a bull? What about the double-headed axe of the Cretan Zeus and the same weapon of the Hittite Amazon priestesses, the traditional founders of Ephesus ? Did Crete give Zeus to Greece, or do we only find very primitive elements in the worship of the god, throwing light, possibly, on his origin ? ^ How did Zeus-worship evolve from that of the ' It is well to recall that the names Larisa, Zakynthos, Arisbe, Narkissos, and the like are not Greek. ^ 'Zeus' may be merely a late conventional way of naming the Cretan bull god. BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 91 Nature-Mother? Can we trace a parallel evolution of Yahw^h? In like manner, the brute-headed men on the Minoan seals, although they present afi&nities with Babylonia, refer one immediately to Egypt. And the same problems arise. Whatever may be the final consensus of scholarship as to details, it is probable that the Cretan excavations have disclosed a civiliza- tion of Oriental, rather than Occidental, temper. Minoan culture belongs with the Near East, not with western Europe, even if its cursive script may yet conceal much. It may be, for example, that the Cretan empire builders and the ancient Libyan race of Egypt are of common stock. If so, then we must look for the roots of Greek civilization in Africa! Now for our present point. '^Egean' culture as Asian (or African) is a startling idea to those of us who have been taught time out of mind to consider Greece the bulwark of European salvation from 'barbaric' eastern conquest. Nay, our boyhood tradition hails from Plato : "We are pure Hellenes," he says,^ "having no admixture of foreigners, and therefore the hatred of the barbarian has passed unadulterated into the life-blood of the city." These, and similar discoveries, serve to show how a priori ^ Menexenus, 245. Suoui'B Sm;s3J3}ui Xippads si I'eqyVV ■5[33u puB suij^ aq; uo sSuu j3a[ts pui3 'JV3 aijj jo ;uojj ui siBadd^ juatu-BUjo J3AJIS B Suj3;;Bd jioj-aii-enb jnjpnBaq ■e q;iM paj-eiooap si aqoj aqx 'dno j3A{is p9;unoui -p|o§ B Suii-Baq qjnoX 13 jo ^i^d laddn aq; sq o; paAoid ^BqAV jo s^uamS'Bjj aSjBj om} ;q§ii oj auiBD aiaqi lunaJiXdoij uiaqjnos aq; jo jfo^q aq; ;b sS-essBd B UI suq9p puB qp-Ba aq; SuuaAooun /jpjajBO uj „ •sossoii;^; ;'b ,,'jai'Baqdn3„ aqi 'oosajj pip -uajds aqi jo AjaAoosip siq jo ;unoD0T3 uavo s^suBAg -jq Xq UBqi pai^nsrijii ia;jaq ajaqAvou aiB aouBjouSi puB qaiBasai jo sapn}i;jB aAipadsai aqj^ -jnoq^iM uiojj aouaiajiaiui [■einiBU'Bjdns pauinsaid b oj aouaiajaj Aq ;ou 'spBj aq; xuojj SuiuBaui aq^ ipqa ayW "uiqjiM UIOJJ uoiiBUB^dxa o:^ a^qBuauiB ssaaoid avo^s 'Suoy B SB jjas^i s;uasajd ajn;po uBuinq jo Xio;siq aqi ^Bq; 'amij }sjij aqj joj 'azipaj aM puy 'az^S ^d-ei jno aiojaq papBJ^d aABq 'isBg ibj; aqj 01 jBipoad suop -BzijiAp aqi JO §uiq;ou /ivs o^ 'sdiqspjojjaAO UBisiajj puB 'uBSBp|Bq3 'uBpdXSg 'uBiiiCssy 'a^IHIH '^^^ -Bia 'UBiuo^^qBa 'uBiiarang -suopBjauag aajqi isbj asaqj saauaps ,uBUinq, aq; ^Cq jqSnoiAV sqdmnu; XuBui JO auo jnq suuoj ;sBd aqj jo uoipajjnsaj siqj^ •spBj ainosqo jo poo;sjapunsim ;nq 'iBqiuiBj jo juauiaSuBiiBai aAi;isuBJi ajojaq Xbav 9AiS puB 'aSpajMouii Avau jo aoBj ui uopBuiiojsuBj; o; ppiif ;snui sapqiqissod aApBjnDads puB sauoaqj janaa ni sisiko anx aav XHonoHX N^iaaoH s6 BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 93 the ornaments is an agate gem on the left wrist, thus illustrating the manner of wearing the beautifully engraved signets of which many clay impressions were found in the palace. " The colours were almost as brilliant as when laid down over three thousand years before. For the first time the true portraiture of a man of this mys- terious Mycenasan race rises before us. The flesh tint, following perhaps an Egyptian precedent, is of a deep reddish brown. The limbs are finely moulded, though the waist, as usual in Mycenaean fashions, is tightly drawn in by a silver-mounted girdle, giving great reHef to the hips. The profile of the face is pure and almost classically Greek. This, with the dark curly hair and high brachycephalic head, re- calls an indigenous type well represented still in the glens of Ida and the White Mountains — a type which brings with it many reminiscences from the Albanian highlands and the neighbouring regions of Montenegro and Herzegovina. The lips are some- what full, but the physiognomy has certainly no Semitic cast.^ The profile rendering of the eye shows an advance in human portraiture foreign to Egyptian art, and only achieved by the artists of classical Greece in the early fine-art period of the fifth cen- tury B.C. — after some eight centuries, that is, of barbaric decadence and slow revival. ' It may be noted that the purest type of the Semite is the Arabian, and that type does not correspond to the one generally suggested by the word ' Semite,' viz. the Jew and Assyrian. 94 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF " There was something very impressive in this vision of brilliant youth and of male beauty, recalled after so long an interval to our upper air from what had been till yesterday a forgotten world. Even our untutored Cretan workmen felt the spell and fascina- tion. They, indeed, regarded the discovery of such a painting in the bosom of the earth as nothing less than miraculous, and saw in it the 'icon' of a Saint ! The removal of the fresco required a delicate and laborious process of underplastering, which necessitated its being watched at night, and old Mano- lis, one of the most trustworthy of our gang, was told off for the purpose. Somehow or other he fell asleep, but the wrathful Saint appeared to him in a dream. Waking with a start, he was conscious of a mysterious presence; the animals round began to low and neigh, and 'there were visions about'; '^'"-VTa^ei,' he said, in summing up his experiences next morning, 'the whole place spooks.' " ' ' The Monthly Review, March, 1901, pp. 124-125. In the number for January, 1901, of the same magazine, see Mr. D. G. Hogarth's article on The Birth Cave of Zeus (pp. 49 fif.). Further details, in articles by th^se authors, and by Messrs. F. B. Welch and Duncan Mackenzie, are to be found in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (London), especially vols, xxi and xxii; also in the Annual of the British School at Athens. The most convenient synopsis of the whole subject, with the literature complete to date, is offered in The Discoveries in Crete and their bearing on the History of Ancient Civilization, Professor Ronald M. Burrows (London, 1907). BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 95 Dr. Evans embodies constructive criticism, Mano- lis naive presupposition. Accordingly, we may now ask. What is the his- torico-critical attitude? On the historical side, this point of view teaches that man's spiritual life pre- sents an organic whole, governed by immanent principles pecuhar to itself. Culture-history thus discloses its secret in an unbroken series of manifes- tations and, wherever the import of the process has been penetrated, a self-controlled unity has afforded satisfactory clews. No doubt, the differentiating principle that interpenetrates all continues to defy deepest plummet. To assert that its "stream of tendency" is 'necessary,' reduces the mystery not a whit. Nevertheless, we seem to see at least that the sole medium of the revelation is man himself. To adopt Tieck's phrase, civilization (in the sense of culture) possesses " its own centre, its own soul, as it were, from which the controlling spirit penetrates all parts, even the most remote." To reconstruct this synthetic activity is the aim of historical method. And, so far as the perplexing task has attained suc- cess, history has reconstituted itself, because it has proved to be a self-propelled growth. Thus, on the side of its larger setting, the historico-critical method turns out to be philosophical, and "is an endeavour 96 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF to import unity and connexion into the scattered directions of cultural thought, to follow each of these directions into its assumptions and into its conse- quences." ' The critical factor of the process differs little in temper and procedure from any other kind of sci- ence. In a word, it must be classed with ordinary inductive knowledge. By application of the inductive method to languages, literary documents, monuments, objects of art, pottery, traditions, and the like, con- trolled effort is put forth to elicit what they have to tell about themselves. The Egyptian monuments, the cuneiform inscriptions, the Vedas, palimpsest Mss., Thucydides's "History of the Peloponnesian War," Xenophon's "MemorabiHa," the contents of the New Testament, and so on, yield information about themselves whereby we arrive at a definite grasp upon what they were and imply. In all cases alike the same standards and processes apply. Thus scholars essay to set the materials in their real rela- tions and, by a consecutive system of checks and balances, to reduce them to consistency with them- selves and one another. In this manner they place men in a position to guard themselves against mis- conception, or naive inference, and deliver them 1 Grundzuge der Logik, H. Lotze, sec. 88 (ist ed.). BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 97 from the substitution of preconceived belief or opin- ion for objective fact. As a result, explanation pre- cipitates itself from within the circle of the evidence, and extraneous interference becomes a superfluous hypothesis. The analytic exhibition of origins and concomitant conditions enables the expert to pass from individual cases to a synthesis of principles that holds vahd universally for similar phenomena. The corrupt Hebrew, the imaginary history, and the apoc- alyptic fiction of Daniel, for example, prove the book a product of the Maccabsean epoch, just in the same way as Plato's language, and the development of his technical doctrine, throw light upon the order of the Dialogues. The exhibition of sources, that is, leads to an elucidation of credibility, scope, and significance. Pelops and Cadmus were the ancestors of the Greeks precisely as Abraham and Jacob of the Israelites. We have no more reason to believe that Plato took down the sayings of Socrates on the spot, and transcribed them in the 'Socratic' Dialogues, than that the Synoptists performed a like office for Jesus. Above all, both problems are to be settled by the exercise of identical discrimination, by the use of the same standards — there happens to be no other way. Results may diverge widely in detail, exactly as they do in the natural sciences, but the method of 98 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF approach and the attitude before the evidence must remain unchanged for all cases equally. "No Tyrian trader from the world shall hoard His splendour for salvation, no dismay Shall rant on flame-bursts, nor to element Resign the soul ! But something of a faith In understanding of a modem mood Shall mean God most in complications sprung Of fluxion, spring-life and the lift of earth Inevitable. And my theme shall be . Let the new creed afford right meaning for The creed rejected, let the new art show Old myth subordinant, old metaphor But outworn fact : thus, the new fact full truth. No sceptical dismay More, nor withdrawal from the market-place And sphere of high contention faith with faith! Here is earth's wonderful sweet market-place Of blossoming contention — ' would my soul Had learn'd herself so as a world of men ! ' " We see, then, that the historico-critical movement is not encompassed with any sort of mystery. It amounts to an attempt on man's part to master the meaning of his own past by reference to principles that reach formulation only on the basis of exact inquiry, and complete loyalty to the canons of ordi- nary experience. Trace the phenomena to their BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 99 historical origins, follow out their life career, and it will be found invariably that they suffice to sys- tematize themselves; the rest is conjecture. The identity, mutatis mutandis, between the relations of the 'Powers' of the Near East in the time of the Tel-el- Amarna "Letters," and those of the European 'Powers' in our own day, is almost laughable. But, till criticism exploited the "Letters," and history drew the unavoidable inferences, this knowledge failed us.' The materials, then, are, on the one hand, prob- lems to be solved ; on the other, ideas to be appre- ciated. The results garnered wield moral influence chiefly ; they are calculated to impress the will by al- tering one's attitude towards the enthralling drama of history. Nevertheless, as contrasted with the sci- entific consciousness, the historico-critical movement has remained more or less "caviare to the general," and for evident reasons. It depends upon evidence difficult to glean, and still more difficult to master, so as to be able to interpret it. It appeals to fluid qualitative judgements rather than to practical (and therefore simple) quantitative standards. Most of ' An excellent description of the historico-critical method is to be found in vol. i of The Hexateuch, by J. Estlin Carpenter and G. Harford-Battersby (London, 1900). lOO MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF all, the social mind has never associated it with a rough-and-ready theory of the universe which, on account of its evident, if profound, implications for life, obtains widespread attention in print designed specially for the popular eye. And yet, as I have said, its thrust into the traditional views of religion is more radical by far. Let us look at this for a little, concentrating attention upon the biblical narratives and documents. I. Ancient History At the outset it is imperative to realize that we must slough all ideas of chronology, and of the pivotal importance of the "seed of Abraham," traceable to dogmatic opinions about the 'books of Moses.' According to these delusions, a period of 1656 years intervened between the Creation and the Flood, of 290 years between the Flood and the birth of Abraham, of 720 years between the birth of Abraham and the Exodus — 2666 years altogether. Adam, and the other worthies who peopled these two and a half millennia, were conceived to be historical person- ages as a matter of course; nay, more, their careers were moulded by a tendency that proceeded from Yahw6h in a series of special revelations. The Deity interposed directly, from time to time, to promote BREACHES OF THE HOUSE lOI the welfare of Israel ; in short, the universe was cre- ated with particular regard to Israel's mission ; univer- sal history circled round this vocation ; all else was subordinate. We are aware now that, while these pious recitals may serve to edification, their historical conspectus is totally untenable. The Creation, a sinless Adam in Paradise, the Fall, the confusion of tongues, and the rest, may remain passing good folk- lore ; they never happened in the course of culture- history. The chronology, that is, has no basis in fact, while the glamour that surrounds Israel amounts to a freak of late fancy playing upon legends relative to a mythical past. The truth, so far as ascertainable, tells a very different story. Take a map of western Asia and northeastern Africa, place a pair of nut-crackers upon it so that the hinge lies on the Gulf of Issus; now move the right-hand leg till it passes beyond the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, covering Susa; move the left- hand leg till it coincides with the Nile valley and covers Thebes. The territory enclosed by this base- less triangle includes the biblical lands. Next, keep- ing the hinge steady, bring the right-hand leg down sharply, move the left-hand leg slowly about an inch — the line of pressure and contact will coincide with Palestine. The one movement indicates the fre- 102 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF quent and rapid incursions into Palestine from the Euphrates-Tigris valley, the other the more leisurely and less frequent invasions from Egypt. Further, as compared with the sweep of the extended legs, the narrow line of junction denotes the relatively small geographical extent and importance of the ProE> ised Land. It is a tiny thing, squeezed continually between world-empires. Even for the brief period under David and Solomon, when the consolidated Israelitish territory became rather larger than Massachusetts, and when its 'world-power' ran from Kadesh and Damascus in the north to Beersheba and, possibly, Elath, on the Gulf of Akabah, in the south, it was never equipped to compete on equal terms with its mighty neighbours. Moreover, an Israel bounded on the north by Kadesh and Laish, on the south by Gaza and Rabbath Moab, was an ideal rather than a reality, the short time of Davidic prosperity aside. Indeed, so rapid was the decline after the blaze of glory that attracted the Sabaean queen, and enabled Solomon (as opinion still runs) to marry a Pharaoh's daughter, that, in 750 B.C., Israel's territory measured but one hundred miles from north to south, seventy-five from east to west; while little Judah, the eventual heir of the apocalyptic tradition, included just fifty square miles. What BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 1 03 could they do against Assyria, or Babylon, or Egypt, against empires ruling, sometimes, 230,000 square miles of the richest country in that world? Little, except as their powerful enemies fell upon weakness, as in the days of Jeroboam II, or of the Hasmonaeans, when "the yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel." This reversal of perspective regarding temporal importance finds parallel at least as transforming when we come to questions of chronology and the history of culture. It seems a far cry to the dawn of the Christian era. The obscure migration — one of several like it — whence the legendary personality of Abraham was precipitated, runs back from the first Christian century just about the same period as we date forward from it. And yet the exquisite silver vase of Entemena, the priest-king of Lagash, in southern Babylonia, transports us to a time nineteen hundred years before the Abrahamitic migration.' Nevertheless, even Entemena was a modern man, if we grope to the first settlement of Eridu, the city of the god Ea, by the Sumerians, some 6500 B.c.^ ' Cf. Explorations in Bible Lands, H. V. Hilprecht, p. 241. ^ C£. Babylonians and Assyrians; Life and Customs, A. H. Sayce, p. 2. Professor Sayce's date is based upon the rate of alluvial deposit in the Persian Gulf from the time of Alexander. It should, 104 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF Nay, when we quit history for myth, the Babylonian calculations put the biblical to utter shame. From the Creation to the Deluge ten kings reigned for 432,000 years; from the Deluge to the Persian con- quest was an astronomical period of 36,000 years. But, without trenching upon myth, or calling atten- tion to the remarkable correspondence of the Baby- lonian figures with the conclusions of modem science as to the age of man upon earth, the bare facts furnish food enough for reflexion. The people known to us as the Hebrews belonged to the Semitic stock which, as recent investigation has proved, played a foremost r61e in the development of human culture. While it is difficult to formulate the divisions of the race in a manner entirely satis- factory, any one of the several arrangements adopted by scholars serves to show wide extension, exceptional vitality, and primary importance. Thus, for ex- ample, the North Semites fall into four divisions, viz.: (i) Babylonian (Old Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldasan) ; (2) Aramaean (Mesopotamian, Syrian) ; (3) Canaanitic (Canaanites, Phoenicians) ; (4) He- braic (Hebrews, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites). perhaps, be stated that Eridu is said to have been on "the shore of the sea" in the reign of Dungi, son of Ur-en-Gur, cir. 3000. Cf. Orient. Lit. Zeitung, 1907, S. 583. BREACHES OF THE HOUSE I05 There were three groups of South Semites, viz., (i) Sabseans, (2) Ethiopians, (3) Arabs.' The for- tunes of the Hebrews form part and parcel of Semitic civilization as a whole, and at a late period, compara- tively, in its development. So much so that, if we recall the picturesque story of Joseph, we must recog- nize many waves of migration from Arabia, not merely in subhistorical, but also in prehistoric, times. With these the "chosen people" were intertwined inex- tricably, and they formed no exception to a very general rule. Causes operative elsewhere, and on a much larger scale, suffice to explain the recorded phenomena, when they have any historical basis. The course of events prior to the Exodus of Hebrew tradition may be outlined as briefly as possible. Apart from a general view of it, one cannot realize the import of later history and, very specially, adjust the focus. Old Babylonia was settled in remote days by a non-Semitic people, the Sumerians. They were city folk, and the city appears to have been the unit of government. The principal settlements of this pre- historic age were Eridu, on the Persian Gulf, Ur, some forty miles west on the Euphrates, and Nippur, ' Cf. History, Prophecy, and the Monuments, James Frederick McCurdy, vol. i, p. 19. Io6 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF about eighty miles northwest, near the centre of the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris. When the first Semitic hordes migrated to this region is not known. At all events, in farthest historical times, and earlier, a Semitic culture had blossomed here already, and the Sumerians had become incorporated in a civilization which, though influenced profoundly by the older race, was Semitic in general character. From this cosmopohtan culture the first great empire of western Asia came forth. So early as Sargon of Agadfe, Palestine ranked with other Babylonian prov- inces. His son, Naram-Sin, obtained, amongst other spoil, a vase of Egyptian alabaster, itself indicative of the extent of his conquests. Nor was it a. crude civilization that penetrated to Palestine thus early. Sargon's gem-cutters produced specimens of their art equal to the best work of later periods, and the bas-relief portrait of Naram-Sin rivals, if it does not surpass, the familiar masterpieces of Assyria two millennia after. Religion and law, government and commerce, had made distinct advances. Art had reached high development. The arch, so indispen- sable to large archievement in architecture, and sup- posed usually, until a recent date, to have been in- vented by the Romans about looo B.C., was used in Babylonia nearly 3000 years before this time. About BREACHES OF THE HOUSE I07 2700 B.C., when Gudea was priest-king of Lagash, with Ur-Nina of Ur as suzerain, we find Palestine still under Babylonian domination, and this relation seems to have existed for at least two hundred years more. Then followed a second Arab migration, known as the Amoritic, which overflowed Hither Asia (including Palestine), South Arabia, and, possibly, Egypt. In 2225 B.C., we find a Semitic Pharaoh (Khyan) — a "lord of the desert," or chief of Beduin. These Amorites appear to have been absorbed by the populous Babylonia and Egypt, but in Palestine they maintained themselves as a separate people. After the disintegration of the Babylonian government resultant upon this incursion, the moun- taineers of Elam, to the northwest of the Euphrates- Tigris plain, who had doubtless suffered chastisement at the hands of their more progressive neighbours, saw their opportunity, and attacked the wealthy lowlanders, sacking Nippur, and scattering destruc- tion among the monuments of a civilization that had already wielded overlordship for the same period as Christianity has now ruled the Western world. The much disputed fourteenth chapter of Genesis may be a Palestinian reminiscence of this raid; if so, the emigration of Abraham was an incidental phenome- non in a widespread movement. But the Elamites Io8 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF had to reckon with the Canaanite or Amorite invaders who thus preceded them. For from them sprang a dynasty whose main ornament was the famous juridical monarch, Hammurabi. According to the latest calculation, he reigned about 1900 B.C., that is, seven centuries before the Exodus. Under him Babylon became the metropolis of western Asia, and entered upon her wonderful career as the holy city of this vast region. As some think now, not Jerusalem, or Rome, but Babylon, was "the mother of us all." Hammurabi not only redeemed the old empire from the Elamite yoke, but restored its supremacy to the shores of the Mediterranean. It can hardly be doubted that some of the legislation to be found in the "Book of the Covenant" (Ex. xx. 22-xxiii. 33; xxxiv. 11-26) was related closely to his great code, graven upon the black diorite pillar now in the Louvre. The dominion of Babylonia, thus rein- augurated by Hammurabi, was destined to last for four centuries. That Palestine prospered during this period, became, in fact, the " land flowing with milk and honey," we know from the Egyptian "Romance of Sinhuit." Agriculture and commerce flourished, civilization was accordant. Yet a third migration brought this period to an end, when the Kassites, a Tartar-like people from BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 109 central Asia, broke through Elam, and founded a dynasty in Babylon. In the same epoch a non-Semitic race, the Mitanni, carved out a kingdom on the head- waters of the Euphrates, and thus cut off Babylonia from her trade routes with western Asia. Syn- chronous with these movements was the successful invasion of Egypt by the Shepherd or Hyksos kings, who were Asiatics — possibly Semites, and who held rule in Palestine, after some sort, ere they over- whelmed Egypt, if Numbers xiii. 22 is to be cred- ited. It is within the bounds of possibility that the eponyms of the Exodus set out upon their wanderings in this era, as a wavelet in the general unrest. The net result, as concerns the present theme, was the decline of Babylonia, whose commerce waned, and the rise of Egypt, to freedom first, then to world- empire, after she had expelled the hateful foreigners. With Thebes as base, the seventeenth dynasty began the Hundred Years' War which, under Aahmes, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, resulted in the final rout of the Hyksos. If contemporary records run true, the defeated Shepherds retired into Pales- tine. The Egyptian monarch was compelled to pur- sue as a matter of mere prudence, and, eventually, his countrymen gained an Asiatic empire to the Euphrates plain. This was achieved by Thothmes no MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF III (1493 B.C.), the mightiest of the Pharaohs, whose rule, assured at the battle of Megiddo in northwestern Palestine, extended over Upper and Lower Egypt, through the Sinaitic Peninsula and Palestine as far as Coele-Syria, thence south and east, including the old kingdom of Agadb and Hammurabi, to the borders of Elam. Egyptian governors were placed in the con- quered provinces, to render administration perma- nent. Thothmes died two hundred years before the Exodus, and his rearrangement of the civilized world maintained itself for a century. Later antagonists of Egypt, like the Hittites and Assyrians, are on friendly terms with Amenhotep III, as the Tel-el-Amama "Letters" show. These letters, moreover, reveal the amazing fact that Babylonian civilization had become so engrained in Hither Asia that its language and script were the media of communication between educated people, and the sole proper form for diplo- matic correspondence between rulers. Not only the dwellers in the Euphrates-Tigris district, but the Hittites, Canaanites, and even the imperial Egyptians themselves, employ it. It stood to this period and provenance as French did to eighteenth-century Europe, and communication in the ancient epoch appears to have been as frequent, regular, and easy as in the modern. An excellent postal ser- BREACHES OF THE HOUSE III vice, conducted probably by Beduin, was in existence. Religious dissension overtook Egypt in the next reign, and thereupon her power suffered decline. The Hittites descended upon Syria from the Taurus, and the Khabiri (probably another migration from Arabia) threatened Abd-khiba, the official who governed Jerusalem for the Pharaoh. The Hittite king, Sapalulu, made himself supreme to the north of Palestine, while Moab and Ammon, the "children of Lot," came to bear rule in the southeast. Notwith- standing this pressure from two sides, the Canaanite strongholds in central Palestine seem to have main- tained themselves intact — a fact full of meaning. The fourth migration, the Aramaeic, must be con- nected closely with the biblical legends of the pa- triarchs and their involuted domestic relations. This state of disorder in Palestine was ended by Sety I (1345 B.C.), who reduced the country to vassalage once more, carrying his conquest as far as Lebanon. His son, Rameses II, the most famous of Pharaohs, continued this policy, and came into conflict with the Hittites. After twenty years of indecisive fighting, both powers negotiated a solemn treaty of alliance whereby Palestine remained to Egypt, Syria to the Hittites. Having married the daughter of Khate- 112 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF sera, the Hittite monarch, Rameses spent the remain- der of his long reign in cultivation of the arts of peace. He blossomed into a great builder, using forced labour, like all Oriental potentates, and, in this con- nexion, took his place in biblical quasi-history as the "Pharaoh of the Oppression." When the "mixed multitude" of slaves — barbarians, as the Egyptians deemed them — fled into the desert, we do not know ; no details survive that suffice to throw any light upon the subject. But over and over again we must em- phasize the fact that it is only at this point in the tremendous panorama that Israel makes its first appearance on the stage, not of history, indeed, but of direct tradition. Whatever the Exodus may have been historically, the conditions for its occurrence eventuated between 1250 and 1190 B.C., when Egypt lay in a condition of civil anarchy. The shepherds of Goshen, if they moved, left during this period, and their descendants, several generations later, arrived eventually in a land which had been highly civilized for two thousand years, and had undergone already a series of vicissitudes as dramatic as any that were to follow. Finally, about this period a, fifth, and wholly differ- ent, migration took place. Driven from their main- land homes on the coasts of Asia Minor and Greece, BREACHES OF THE HOUSE 1 13 and probably from the ^Egean Islands, by northern foes, these non-Semitic people fell upon Egypt, swarmed overland to Syria, or came by sea to the Palestinian coasts. This displacement may have synchronized with the final destruction of Minoan civilization in Crete. In any event, the Philistines, cast upon the shores of Palestine by it, were not an indigenous race, and it is at least an interesting specu- lation that they may have been descendants of the master-builders of Knossos. To this invasion the dissolution of the Hittite empire was due. In Egypt the intruders were unsuccessful, for Rameses II defeated them at sea off the Phoenician cities. Hav- ing thus secured herself, Egypt withdrew from inter- ference in Palestine for two hundred and seventy-five years. Evidently, then. Hither Asia had waxed very old ere Israel threw itself upon the southeastern limits of Palestine, so recently attacked on the west by the Philistines. And, be it noted, the entire history to this point, its awe-inspiring scale and its invocation of gods innumerable notwithstanding, has presented no abnormal, non-human, or supranatural features. Is there any reason to suppose that a sixth, and minor, migration of Arab nomads will not remain amenable to ordinary historical causes and racial characteristics ? 114 MODERN THOUGHT AND THE CRISIS IN BELIEF 2. The Old Testament Having thus tried to realize that Old Testament times form but a fragment of Semitic civilization, to say nothing of ancient civilization as a whole, and that, according to present knowledge, the customary exclusion of this consideration results in a false per- spective, with its indefensible exaggeration of an episode, let us turn now to the Hebrews themselves. Confronted with the history of Israel, wt discover at once that a grave disadvantage besets us. To those who have bestowed little or no attention upon the matter, the reason may well occasion profound surprise. In the nature of the case, the records that present the history of Babylonia, Egypt, and Assyria are the veritable originals for the most part. Further, they are often contemporary with the events related. Deeds from the offices of the great Babylonian bank- ers, the Egibi firm, and of their earlier colleagues, the house of Murashu, at Nippur, are in our hands, signed, sealed, and delivered on the occasions of the transactions which they detail. Besides, we are aware that editing in Babylonia — " was done with scrupulous care. Where a character was lost in the original text by a fracture of the tablet, the copyist stated the fact, and added whether BREACHES OF THE HOUSE "S the loss was recent or not. Where the form of the characlcT was uncerlain, both the signs which it re- sembled ;ii-e given. Some i